Shaken in My Faith
by apsara
Summary: Were Serenity and Endymion the first to find temptation in breaking the ban? Or did two of their guardians have more reason to condemn their fatal affair, other than bare fear of the unknown? Senshi/Shitennou, Rei/Jadeite.
1. Shaken in My Faith: Author Note

**Shaken in My Faith: Author's Note**

**STORY STUFF:** So, I felt like writing some SilMil, even though I'm always nervous that it's going come out sounding all Monty-Python-meets-Lord-of-the-Rings (this is probably no exception). Ugh. Seriously. I CANNOT do SilMil, so pleaseee don't skewer me for trying. If you've read Panchali, this fic is kind of a prequel to that – I think it'll be somewhere between a legit multichaptered story and a series of vignettes, if that makes sense.

I'm basically stuck on Jadeite being the first of the Shitennou to go batshit, or be possessed, or betray everyone he loves, or whatever, so this is basically my "why Jadey whyyy :(" I sort of wrote him as a cross between Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, because in my head at least, all of the Shitennou have had to fight for their thrones, not just hung out in Endymion's court since they were anklebiters. I also thought it'd be fun to play around with the religious and cultural aspects of it, since he's the king of the Far East and all…so I tried to incorporate some Buddhist/Hindu/etc. aspects for fun without going too crazy. There's a glossary at the bottom of the fic if anything is confusing...if it's not there, it'll probably be explained in the next part. Umm what else. Oh, so the overarching theme of this one comes from the Hindu story of Mars's birth. I wanted to create a sort of strange bond between Mars and Earth – based on a legend coming out of Jadeite's kingdom itself – and so have it plausibly be that Rei and Jadeite might have met before any of the others did, even Serenity and Endymion. Stretching canon thin, sure, but hopefully not breaking it? :P

Will eventually feature sex and bad words and maybe violence.

I love when people tell me what they think, so any thoughts or criticisms would be hugely appreciated :D

**DISCLAIMER: **All the usual disclaimers apply. Nothing in these stories is mine except for the plot – Sailormoon and any other copyrighted property belong solely to their respective holders.


	2. Master of Illusion Part One

**Shaken in My Faith: Master of Illusion – Part One**

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_Master of illusion – can you realize?  
__Your dream's alive  
__You can be the guide, but…_

-Queensryche, _Silent Lucidity_

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_Earth has ever been a lowly world, brought lower by the brutality and strife its inhabitants so delight in. Perhaps it's not so surprising, then, that the fiercest of the godly pantheon once called it home. It's whispered of still, how the lord of Destruction meditated so intently upon his supernal mountain that he perspired from his efforts. How those three drops of Shiva's sweat birthed a boy-child, red-tinged and lusty, who was given to the tenderhearted Earth-mother to rear._

_Though Shiva ultimately bestowed upon the worthy youth a mightier abode of his own – Earth's sister planet, like a burning star – the god of War never forgot the hospitality of his birthplace, and thus the people of Mars were always curiously drawn to their forebear's native and nascent land._

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Jadeite thinks it's a good sign, that his audience with the witch-queen was obtained with such speed. One, because he has no time to waste. Two, because he thinks it means she's curious to hear what he has to say. And the latter is something remarkable, something that hasn't been true of relations between Earthly rulers and their interplanetary counterparts for as long as anyone can remember. Of course, it's hard to recall the last time Earth cared to parley with its neighbors, too – not even one so near as Mars.

So it would come as no surprise, if the famed Martian Oracle bided her time, made him sweat. Especially since he's never forgotten how the old crone treated his father, so many years ago – not a single word of welcome spoken, for all the miles he'd traveled to revere her. Even if Jadeite's achieved a rank his father never dreamed of, the witch-queen might very well keep his son waiting as well, in her spite. And in truth, that's fine with Jadeite, despite the myriad pressures on his schedule. It has taken patience to get where he is, presence of mind to stay there, and he is prepared to wait as long as necessary to do what must be done.

The general himself knows he's a man possessed of unusual stillness, and it serves well to unnerve his enemies. While he sits without fidgeting or scowling, two female attendants stonily serve him food and drink, much of it reminiscent of delicacies from his homeland. The pair of them are darkly complected – oilslick hair, snapping eyes – and Jadeite privately entertains himself by imagining their reaction, if he told them how closely they resemble the untamed, beguiling steppe women of his realm. Delicacies from his homeland, indeed. He offers them a lazy smile, full of promise, and they rush away, clearly feeling no particular compulsion to be cordial.

"Something amuses you, Lord Jadeite. I am pleased to see you so at home here that you laugh freely."

The Far Eastern king recognizes, without ever having heard her before, how the voice of the Oracle washes the vaulted hall with its sibylline power.

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She's dressed opulently, like any celestial creature of his varied subjects' imaginings – the bodhisattvas, the apsaras, the tennin. A dozen sunrise-hued layers of rich brocade emphasize, rather than overwhelm, her small frame, and a heavy-looking diadem pulls her tresses back from her face, where they fall unfettered to the floor behind her. The general's never seen so much unbound hair, at least not outside the privacy of his bed – it must be a more seemly style here than the elaborate ladies' coiffures on Earth. But these are not the attributes that make Jadeite stand slowly, struggling to scrutinize rather than just stare.

Far from the old woman he expected – and remembered, the Martian ruler before him is little more than a girl.

Not a single wrinkle mars that pale oval, and her look is more like a snobbish princess than a sage priestess. But…there can be no doubt that she is the one he waits for. Those eyes still burn as hot as hell, and Jadeite does some rapid calculations in his head, trying to guess at her age – before the Oracle opens her mouth to interrupt his racing thoughts. Recovering quickly from his surprise, he assumes an expression of nonchalance – and why shouldn't he? he thinks. A guileless girl, after all, is even less to fear than a crafty hag, and Jadeite certainly has more experience with the former than the latter. A leisurely smile re-bends his lips, and he's ready.

"It has been many long years, since an Earthly lord visited us here," and her liltingly accented words are easy on the ears, but Jadeite finds some dark amusement in her refusal to call him king. "Welcome."

"You are gracious," he responds with a deferential nod of the head. "Too gracious, in fact. It is not my first time on Mars."

Pique flits briefly over her face; some servant will suffer for not adequately briefing her mistress. Jadeite cannot afford to let the girl recover from her mistake; he's on her turf, and the politically weaker of the two. The general politely and pitilessly drives home her error.

"I met your honored predecessor, I believe, and I am sorry to offer such belated condolences for her passing. You were, perhaps, not yet born when I last came – as I myself was but a small boy. On a heroic exploit, or so all small boys think, with their fathers."

"That is why you do not flinch from my eyes," the witch-queen observes, her countenance smoothing like ripples in milk. Jadeite notes she has the sense to stay right where she is, imperiously gazing down from her raised dais. He's forced to stare up at her, petite though she may be. "You have seen their fire before. And why you smile and flirt so easily with my ladies. Their look is…familiar to you."

"Your people are indeed well-known to me," Jadeite answers her blandly, and is satisfied by her look of grudging intrigue at his enigmatic response. He gets the sense she's one who comes straight to the point, and who also avoids it when ceremony otherwise suits her. The latter impulse seems to have seized her, for the Oracle continues formulaically.

"In that case, we must outdo our own prior hospitality to you, and ensure we are well-known to you as dear friends, not distant neighbors." The Far Eastern king's impressed she can even choke out that particularly saccharine formality with a straight face – and indeed, she appears nearly carved from stone while saying it. Not much for politicking, this one.

"Phobos, Deimos." The attendants rush over, shooting him openly baleful glances. That was more like it. "Kindly escort the Lord Jadeite to his accommodations, in the – " she breaks off into her own language.

Jadeite exhales slowly, trying not to let her see his displeasure at this turn of events. The girl's clever enough to know when to retreat, regroup, rearm; and she has the advantage of distinctly higher ground. He can barely spare a day away from Earth, let alone merrily holiday in the Martians' hostile company. But he remembers his self-made promise – to wait as long as necessary to do what must be done.

The witch-queen's already turning away when Jadeite inclines his head respectfully, but he still catches her fleeting expression of triumph, and the Far Eastern king silently tells her the truth as he knows it.

There has to be a victor.

Here, there's yet to be one.

…

Her fortress is nothing like the high, airy one the Far Eastern king's left behind. A stark thing rising from starker cliffs, externally forbidding and internally labyrinthine. The general loses track of the twists and turns on the way to his accommodations. The halls are dark and his rooms darker; daylight gives way to smoldering braziers and the smell of sulfur and cloying oil pervades. In rare places, massive windows suddenly open wide to the comparatively dim Martian sky, and it takes Jadeite no small amount of time to let his eyes adjust back and forth, to see properly at all. They have the effect of disorienting the visitor, and he guesses that's intentional.

Nothing like a queen's palace, or what he'd expect of one – he knows none to compare with. No feminine hand to drape tapestries or brush against velveted pillows. There are no trappings of pampered royalty here; it seems more a cloister than a castle. Were he to turn slowly in his large chamber, he'd find no identifying feature of her in it, only heavy walls and encroaching space. In contrast to her gloomy surroundings, the girl herself blooms vividly, like some startling, shy mountain bird. Jadeite guesses that's not intentional at all, but it disorients him all the same.

But he's not Zoisite or Nephrite, to while away his time in the pleasures of exploration – either of the castle or its mostly female inhabitants (although were the latter a touch less venom-eyed, he'd consider it). No, he doesn't wander without a discrete objective in mind. Jadeite also studiously avoids his communicator, and the questions (not to mention the iron-faced commander) he knows he'll confront if he opens it; he hates to be tailed like a dog.

It makes him a little sorry for his liege, because there's not a place in the world Endymion could go where the four of them couldn't follow. The general wouldn't trade his responsibilities to his Prince for anything, but part of him will always long for the camp life, the boyhood independence, the electrifying campaigns across the Far East that had proved him worthy of the High Court.

Planning and reminiscing over what troubles wait for him at home keeps the general busy through late afternoon. And so, Jadeite finds himself very much looking forward to their renewed war of words, his and the witch-queen's. She doesn't wait long to jump back into the fray, and a summons arrives for him at dusk, just a bit after dinner.

Sunsets here don't have the riotously diverse hues of Earth's; the sky is so red that Jadeite feels as though he's staring at the insides of his eyelids. But there's a strange and savage beauty to it, as well, and he suddenly recalls something Nephrite had mentioned before he left.

They're formidable archers, the West-king had reflected idly, and say their twilights are red because they have shot the sun from the sky. He sinks below the horizon, and bathes heaven in his blood.

She stands just a few feet away, and now that they're next to each other, Jadeite can see just how diminutive she really is, the top of her head maybe reaching his collarbone. He thinks Kunzite could probably sit on her by accident, and has to suppress a snort of laughter at the thought. Perhaps the Oracle feels conscious of her height too, for she's even more formally attired than before, yellow crown piled high with finely wrought spikes. The general is put in mind of armor, and he suspects it's not without cause.

"I trust your rooms are to your liking, Lord Jadeite." They're both eager to dispense with rituals; he can feel it in the shimmering, dust-strewn air.

"Very much so."

"I believe you might actually tell me if they were not," the witch-queen says with a ghost of a smile. She tries to both flatter his candor and coax it, and he understands why when she continues.

"And how does the young Prince fare?"

There's something mildly hilarious about this girl calling Endymion "the young Prince" – there's no way she's his elder, and Jadeite surmises she's at least a few years younger. If she wasn't yet born to be Oracle when he visited last, there's no way she's graced with the infamous Lunar longevity, despite her rumored years spent in the Moon Sorceress's circle – in the bosom of a most prized little princess. Now the whispers make sense; until this morning, he hadn't understood how an old woman could so easily befriend a barely teenaged Moon heiress. This one's youth shows in her unpracticed probing; Jadeite deflects her blunt query without difficulty.

"I see him only rarely, at great parades and the like, but I am assured the Prince does well."

"Oh? I was given to believe you had finally achieved your father's great wish. That you had at last ascended to the Prince's High Court." The Oracle walks, and indicates that he walk with her. They stretch their legs down the length of the great hall, and half a step behind as protocol dictates, Jadeite sees that her vividly scarlet hair wafts slightly in an unseen wind, though he feels none.

"But," she continues with a shrug, perhaps understanding that he won't be laid bare so easily, "Princelings are a handful, and your many subjects are already more than a few handfuls, certainly."

She learns quickly, Jadeite thinks appreciatively. "Princelings and little princesses alike," he responds, and is unsurprised when her limpid expression remains perfectly unruffled, this time. After their first meeting, the witch-queen comes well-prepared.

"I know nothing of little princesses," she tells him lightly, warming to their thrust and parry. "After all, I never was one. And neither were you."

"A little princess?" he laughs, and after a moment, she does too, though the tips of her ears redden at her linguistic gaffe. The sound of it is husky and sweetly unaccustomed, and he wonders how often the lonely, sheltered Oracle indulges in it. The Far Eastern king knows the weight of sovereignty, but not of divinity, and that makes him wonder as well.

He wonders what her real name is.

"Forgive my impertinence," Jadeite tells her soberly after a moment's silence. "Your grasp on my dialect is far greater than mine on yours could ever be. And you are right, of course. I was not born to royalty."

"Not born, perhaps, but not all of us have the chance to remake our fate as you do," the Oracle murmurs a little unsteadily, almost to herself. Jadeite turns to her, surprised at this new show of vulnerability, and almost steps back when he does. Where he expected uncertainty, he meets the full force of those flaming irises, nearly licking at his face.

The girl speaks slowly at first, and then gains speed and force. Jadeite's curious if this is how it sounds – her mighty gift of foresight, spilling out like lava before it burns her. "Your closeness with the Prince, and the rise of his Shitennou – it's not the only rumor to have reached this fortress. I have also heard…stranger things."

They've halted in their pleasant stroll's progress. Outside, a rubescent sky darkens. Jadeite says nothing and waits for her to fill the silence.

"I have heard how you and your father came out of the West and conquered the steppes, the jungles. The islands and mountains and deserts, and united them under your dragon banner. I have heard that ahead of your father's armies rode a dread vision, a golden general who cloaked himself in many terrifying shapes. How you crowned yourself god-king of the Far East – a yellow-haired mercenary's bastard son, nothing more – and won your position as the Prince's guardian. I have heard…" and here she swallows, almost convulsively. "That Earth-magic is afoot again, for the first time in many ages. That you wear illusion as lightly as your smile."

Jadeite's every suspicion – every reason for coming to Mars – is confirmed by her almost imprudent rush of too-knowledgeable words. The general hadn't expected her hand to show so soon, but the same part of him that rejoices in her forthrightness also respects it. He seizes on it, and his smile falls like an old skin.

"You have heard much, Oracle, so much that I fear your education better mimics espionage." The look she gives him nearly incinerates, and her hair and clothes now tremble as though part of a wavering mirage. He's undaunted. "But I have not come to be interrogated by you like a barbarian. Like my father eighteen years before me, to beg for an ancient crone's battle prophecy. As you say, I've conquered and crowned myself king of the Far Eastern people. And as I say, your people are indeed well-known to me."

Jadeite's level tenor drops with the gravity of his accusation. "I see them in my lands. More and more, every day. It is a strange alliance you all share, that claims to care little for Earth's savage doings, and yet plants spies among us like weeds."

"How dare you – " she begins hotly.

"You think I know so little of my own borders that I can't see them teeming with more Martians than Earth-born men? Do your scouts expect to camouflage themselves among the dark-haired and dark-eyed of the Far East?"

"Perhaps your boyhood encounter with our kind has left you…paranoid." The witch-queen's regained some of her aplomb, redirecting her anger to her scathing tongue. "Insecure. You cannot honestly mean that you see Martians everywhere in your homeland. We are not in the habit of sending our spymasters to rot on Earth. And furthermore, we have never had the _slightest_ interest in your barbarian planet."

"Is that the truth? You must be as conversant with the legend as I am," Jadeite challenges her. "Has it never struck you that our two peoples wear the same black hair and eyes? That our languages share so many roots, and our children so many names? That we choose our leaders as you do – searching for incarnations of our gods, and not passing divinity from royal father to son? Come now, you can't tell me – with all you've heard about me and my conquests and holdings, that any of this sounds fresh to your ears." She opens her mouth, but he continues inexorably. "I will tell you what _I_ have heard, Oracle. That the inhabitants of Mars have always inexplicably longed for Earth – "

The girl scoffs. "You believe that old myth – "

" – that they yearn to return to the birthplace of their patron god. I've heard that Earth makes a tempting morsel for its bloodthirsty sister star."

"You have the nerve to call _us_ bloodthirsty, when your singleminded goal for four and twenty years has been the subjugation of the Far East!"

"And so we bear another similarity. Your people are warriors, cavalrymen and archers like mine, and so they are drawn to my kingdom. That is why they have always migrated there, in secret. On Earth, every drunken Far Easterner can trace his fathers back to three drops of sweat in the sand, long before communication between our two planets became the exception rather than the rule. And it is no treason for Earth-born, to swear that the god of Mars is their distant ancestor. But it _is_ treason for a Martian to live and spy amongst them. If you think to invade, I have come to warn you that _my_ realm is the worst place for you to start, because I know well that my – our – subjects are united in their ferocity. I broke them to my hand. And that – that is why I have come, Oracle. So that war between two warlike peoples may yet be averted."

In the corner of his eye, Phobos and Deimos motion frantically, calling for guards at the sound of their heated exchange, no doubt. The witch-queen notices as well, but a strange resignation has painted her features with quiet. Jadeite knows he's won this round, but something in him still regrets writing this alien passivity on her face. She raises a slim hand, heavy with her planetary seal, and her attendants immediately bow and vanish.

"And does your Prince know you have come to treat with me, on behalf of your own sovereignty?"

"Does it matter? This is not between Earth and an alliance under the Moon – it is between your kingdom and mine. Do your Sorceress – and her daughter the princess – know you've received me?" he counters.

A spark in her embered eyes at that last, fierce and protective, and Jadeite's immediately put in mind of the Moon heiress's speculated-about Senshi, one of the fearsome army assembling against Earth even now.

But the Oracle keeps her secrets, remains defiant.

"I've told you already, Lord Jadeite. I know nothing of princesses, save that there is one. I sit on no throne but the hopes of my people, and the flaming crown I wear burns me most of all."

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**Quick glossary for the weird stuff.**

Shiva – god of destruction in the Hindu pantheon

Mangala – god of Mars and war, again in the Hindu pantheon, but pretty much everywhere else as well…and this little story of his birth is mostly true, too! Minus the non-existent Martians always wanting to go back to Earth, though…

Bodhisattvas – loosely speaking, those on the path toward or achieving enlightenment, in Buddhism

Apsaras – dancers or nymphs of the Hindu heavenly court

Tennin – heavenly spirits prevalent in Japanese Buddhism, in particular


	3. Master of Illusion Part Two

**Shaken in My Faith: Master of lllusion – Part Two**

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_Old gypsy woman spoke to me – said  
__You're a wolf, boy, get out of this town_

-Sea Wolf, _You're a Wolf_

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The Prince enviously calls it daring; Nephrite just chuckles and dubs it curiosity. Maybe Zoisite understands a little of it, but Kunzite can only wearily refer to it as lunacy, and none of them fully apprehend how he sizes up the great unknown and laughs. Jadeite's ruthlessly single-minded in the way he pushes others to their personal precipices, understands people who don't wish to be understood, and it's this acumen that made him both a brutal conqueror and benevolent king. He's like a wolf sinking his canines into a bear, teeth still in its fur after he's been crushed to pap, and this tenacity made Kunzite send him to Mars, against his own best judgment – because Jadeite's commander knows nobody else will go smilingly into that den of secrets and emerge with a bone in his mouth, at all odds and costs.

So when he accepts the Oracle's extraordinary invitation to stay on as her personal guest – indefinitely, not for just a day or two – as a token of Martian goodwill, he's not sure which of those descriptions really suits. Daring? Curiosity? Zoi'd been the one to convince Kunzite to let him go – and he, too, craves riddles, has the sharp tongue to lay them bare – but Jadeite reckons that even the whimsical druid king would refuse this lure.

And yet, he cannot.

Oh, there are reasons. Rationales. No Earth-born man has ever been permitted to visit long on any of the other planets; Jadeite had expected to return to his own troubled kingdom within the day. Indeed, his own father was summarily deported from Mars without even a minute with the Oracle he sought. Despite his many responsibilities waiting for him at home, the Far Eastern king hasn't come _this_ much farther to go back, head hanging in defeat, and the witch-queen's enigma is a temptation too great.

So he stays.

Yes, there are reasons, but as counting days loses its utility, the reasons diminish and fade, and only his lunacy, as Kunzite puts it, remains. Not how Jadeite would advise others, not rational or responsible at all, but just how he chooses to live. Or how he will consent to live, at least, in her cataclysmic wake.

The first puzzle he solves is her name, though he does not yet avail himself of it. It's in an old language still spoken by his subjects, and Jadeite finds perfect symmetry in how it's journeyed from her land to his, down the ages of shared ancestry. Her name is Rahi, and it means wanderer.

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"If the people of your kingdom are really descended from Mars, as they say, you would never have conquered them so easily." Bright sparks dance in her irises. He's learned that fire has many moods, not all of them ferocious. Some days it seems to melt the very flesh from his bones, and other days it brightens like nighttime sunshine. Either way, she's beautiful, and despite their initial hostilities, it never takes Jadeite very long to warm to pretty things.

"Is this how Martians convey their goodwill to Earth? By showing us the superiority of their warriors and weapons?" The general's playful words bounce off the glinting swords and quivers of arrows hung on the walls, as they walk through the dusty, wide-windowed barracks. The "warriors" he speaks of stick their velveted noses out of myriad stalls, nickering inquisitively.

"Superiority?" Rahi scoffs. "You still haven't seen _my_ horse and bow, Lord Jadeite."

She's dressed more simply today, in unembroidered robes that allow better ease of movement. Their saturated dye echoes the rough coral cabochons set in her dainty circlet, glowing in the wild eye of the tallest, broadest horse, who prances agitatedly in his place. The giant beast is saddled and bridled already, no doubt at her prior instruction, and as they get closer, Jadeite sees that his tawny coat appears almost as metal in the dun-filtered sunlight.

"This is my own Daishin."

Rahi reaches up, brushing at his gilded head, and he butts demandingly at his mistress, nearly knocking her over. Jadeite steadies her with a hand at her back, feels how her spine tightens under the thin linen, arching unconsciously away. She's not at all used to someone else's touch. Promised to a god since birth – but probably her jealous Fire's no great lover, he thinks amusedly. He isn't sure if he only fancies her breathlessness when she lightly chides her stallion's ill temper, but Jadeite enjoys her smile nonetheless. After a few days spent in Rahi's company, he knows it's as lovely – and fleeting – as his kingdom's short-lived monsoons.

"He's magnificent, and suitably named, if it means the same in your dialect as it does in mine," the general observes. "Headstrong, I see. I'm impressed you can ride him."

The witch-queen's expression vanishes into shadow as she bends, grabbing some strange fruits from a nearby bucket.

"I…cannot ride here. My life is too precious to chance a horse's turned hoof," she states offhandedly. Daishin, only somewhat appeased, gobbles treats from her palm. "And you're right – he's no lady's mount."

If she doesn't ride here, then where _does_ she ride? Jadeite's tempted to call her on the slip. Rahi is clearly comfortable around these beasts. Doubtless, her familiarity with horses comes from training on the Moon that she won't admit to. Though maybe she's more accustomed to some Lunar toy pony, he mentally dismisses. Daishin doesn't look like he'd countenance a pint-sized prophetess on his mighty back. But he feels too sorry for her to press the point at all. The Martian Council – her advisors since birth – cloisters her tightly on her home planet, and she visibly chafes against their grasping regency. Jadeite's had ample opportunity to notice by now, the many means through which they cleverly shrink the birdcage around their Oracle, all in the name of her vaunted divinity.

"I haven't seen his equal on Earth," the general mildly agrees, instead.

"Nor have I here." Rahi's poise gives way to girlish pride, but only a little. "Our native animals are like yours, I imagine – suited for the steppes, small and dark. He's a gift from Uranus. Their horses are all this shade of sunlight, and run even faster. You'll enjoy putting Daishin through his paces."

She catches him staring at her and snaps her mouth shut. "What?"

"He's yours, Lady. You should ride him."

Unnoticed to her, slender fingers fist in Daishin's coarse mane. "I already said I cannot."

"Can't you?" the general asks again, boldly, and the banked blaze in the Oracle's eyes now leaps indignantly. An enticing flush, a swell of breath in her breast. Oh, fire has many moods indeed, Jadeite thinks knowingly, and this one happens to wind a lazy, pleasant curl of flame straight to the base of his cock. He never anticipated this, to look into hell itself and find it so damnably beguiling.

He smiles at her, but there's matching heat in the general's voice when he throws down the gauntlet.

"After all, I haven't seen your equal on Earth, either."

No mistaking his meaning, and Jadeite wonders if she'll overlook his insolence to her as easily as she condoned his flirting with her attendants. It's unfamiliar prey he finds himself pursuing, snaring a virgin goddess's heart, but that savage, hungry part of him can't resist pushing her as hard as he can, tracing the vein where her pale skin breaks, inside like a red mystery for his taking. And if Jadeite's crowned himself god-king of the Far East, like she says, does he not deserve her?

Rahi turns away – deliberately, imperiously – to the enormous stallion pressing insistently against her side, in a gesture Jadeite interprets as maidenly modesty. Her bright hair obscures her from his view. But the Oracle is more than his match in this hunt, and her low, even pronouncement proves it so.

"You will not see my equal anywhere, Lord Jadeite."

Daishin paws the ground edgily, sensing something amiss. Seeking to occupy her restless fingers, Rahi grasps the animal's face, and he calms a bit, though his eyes still roll nervously. She pulls him to her, murmurs something in her own language against his nose, her mane mixing vividly with the stallion's.

A second passes, then two, and Jadeite decides.

He swiftly spans her waist before he can overthink, before she can react – he still hears the tiniest snarl of warning – and in a moment's time, he's seating Rahi atop the beast.

She doesn't struggle perceptibly in his arms, obviously not wanting Daishin to bolt, but the general's sure there's murder in her face, if only he could see it behind that slipping veil of scarlet. He likes to push, likes to provoke, but he's starting to think something in this girl gives him a death wish.

Jadeite immediately busies himself adjusting the stirrups to her height, briefly speculating over the possibility that she'll kick in his skull. But no, the witch-queen sits stiffly – furious at his audacity, no doubt, but too proud to fussily protest now that she's over six feet off the ground. When the general easily swings himself up behind the saddle, he's surprised at how she automatically shifts, legs bracing against massive shoulders, rubbing the stallion's neck soothingly as he reacts to his second rider. The women of his kingdom scorn sidesaddles as well, but Jadeite's never yet seen a lady so comfortable astride. Rahi's grip on the reins is expertly firm as she urges Daishin into a smooth canter, not wanting to overexert him with Jadeite's additional weight.

At first, she seems apathetic to her companion's proximity, but as Daishin's loping gait necessarily jostles them closer, Jadeite can feel Rahi awkwardly squirm away. He doesn't blame her; anywhere on Earth, it'd be positively scandalous for them to ride like this, she practically bouncing in his lap. Then again, if he'd known she rode this ably, he would've simply taken another horse. Or would he? The flowers-smoke scent of her blowing into his nostrils, lissome waist and taut bottom tucked into his front…the general allows himself just the beginnings of a smirk. Her loose robes can no longer conceal that she doesn't have the soft body of a lady, given to leisure, but of a dancer, supple as bowstring. A dancer, or…

Jadeite leans in, resting his palms on her forearms, tensing of fine sinew beneath. "So she can ride," he speaks against Rahi's cheek, where he knows she will hear him. Despite the intimacy of their positions, his tone is casual. "What other martial arts are the Senshi of the Moon taught?"

"Unless you wish to learn firsthand, Lord Jadeite, I suggest you keep your hold on the saddle horn, rather than my person."

Her threat rings out, clarion as two swords clanging, but the Far Eastern king just throws his golden head back and laughs loudly, the satisfied sound carrying in the wind past their ears. He can't possibly miss the tremble of delight undercutting her warning. The witch-queen's too happy to be outside her stifling castle to care overmuch about discretion. They both know her words are as close to an admission – of her time spent training on the Moon – as Jadeite's going to get.

The stallion quickly picks up on his mistress's exhilaration, and speeds his steps, but Jadeite tugs on her wrist, and in turn, the reins. Daishin grunts irritably, impatient to run, and Rahi can't suppress an abrupt, choked giggle at his inordinately human grumbling.

Both of the riders begin to laugh, helplessly. Daishin slows to a standstill, clearly too disgusted by their conduct to continue, and they laugh harder.

"That's a keen arrow you keep behind your teeth, Lady," Jadeite finally manages, trying to suck in a lungful of air. He jumps off Daishin's broad back and takes the reins from Rahi, leading the irascible horse back to the castle. "Speaking of. I've seen your beast, but not your bow. Are you as good as they say all Martians are?"

"I have some passing skill," the Oracle answers composedly, long eyelashes barely concealing the hard flint beneath.

They reach the stable, and Jadeite moves around Daishin's side. By now, he's quite sure the sometime Senshi can dismount herself, but he doesn't exactly mind perpetuating the fiction.

"She rides, she shoots, and she admits to none of it, just to save a man's pride. Your Council is quite right, I think – your life _is_ too precious to chance a horse's turned hoof."

"What makes you think my Council tells me what to do?" Rahi throws back at him. She swings her other leg over the saddle, and Jadeite lifts her again, thumbs pushing up the heavy undersides of her breasts. Her fingers grasp at his shoulders, clandestine heat of her exhalation at his neck, and she slides down his length perhaps more slowly than either of them intend. They stand without moving, without enough air to take in between them. Jadeite wholly ignores her question, and his hushed breath in her hair poisons the afternoon quiet.

He has no idea what madness compels him to speak it.

"Your life is too precious to waste, wedded to the Fire – " the said-unsaid is treacherous " – and never to the flesh."

Too far – a tremor, a hiss like a mouthful of snakes. Rahi shoves him away with unexpected – or not – strength, and the general's glad he can't see the Oracle's eyes ignite as she stalks out of the barracks with none of her usual grace. Just as she's silhouetted in the bright doorway, she pauses without looking back.

"No will of mine but the Fire made you my guest, Lord Jadeite. Remember that."

In her absence, Jadeite tugs at his blond curls, rubbing tiredly at his scalp. Instinct informs him that he's sunk his teeth into something that will devour him, if he does not devour it first.

…

Lingering guilt makes Jadeite finally pull out his communicator that evening. Thankfully, Zoisite will probably just mock him for dutifully checking in and call it a night. When Kunzite's face sharpens into focus instead, his planned greeting loses some of its eloquence. "Ah, shit."

His commander's voice is like a glacial wall, and his words make Jadeite feel like he's just walked into one. "Yes. I think that sums it up fairly well."

Generally not one to be reduced to verbal dysentery, the Far Eastern king takes a second before responding. "Kunzite. You know I had – have my reasons."

"I assume that you do, for your own wellbeing." The (deserved, Jadeite admits privately) threat matches the one in Kunzite's icy eyes. "You'll share them with me upon your immediate return, Jadeite."

"I'm not coming back. Not yet." He cuts off whatever his increasingly dangerous-looking commander plans to say next. "I've made progress, and I'll be damned if I let things backslide while I run home to report to you."

"I should have known better than to send you. Your weakness is always the same – you mistake idiocy for independence."

"Who else would you have sent?" Jadeite counters, and Kunzite's knifelike irises sharpen. "Which of us has been to Mars before? What kingdom is descended from their god? And whose lands are overrun with their spies?"

"You came to your throne later in life, and perhaps you do not sit in it as securely as others do." It's like Kunzite's powerful fist going straight to his gut; their commander misses nothing. His knowledge of their respective demons is unerring. "Perhaps I sent you to ease your own fears."

"Bullshit. You sent me because you trust me."

"Yes," Kunzite agrees, without embellishment. "So do not misplace my trust, Jadeite."

A pause, but they both sense the transformation and relax.

"Now. How have you managed to stay on Mars so long? The Prince was beginning to think you either imprisoned or dead."

"I am the personal guest of the Oracle," he informs him neutrally, trying to keep the jubilation from his voice. The corners of Kunzite's lips twitch minutely at that, and Jadeite gives it up, grins wolfishly. "And that, Kunzite, is why you trust me."

"I've always thought your faculty with women…remarkable. Even hags aren't immune, it seems."

Jadeite smoothly sidesteps that bait, promising himself to examine why later. "I've found one of the Senshi, Kunzite."

Even his commander's preternaturally impassive features slacken slightly – invisibly to anyone who doesn't know him well. "One of the Senshi on Mars, hm?" He watches Kunzite's formidable trap of a mind set to prying at that one. "That would certainly explain the Oracle's rumored closeness with the Moon princess."

"In a manner of speaking," Jadeite answers cryptically.

"You _have_ been productive. Do you know why they've dispatched so many of their inhabitants to your kingdom?"

"Not yet, besides the obvious – that they blend in there, both in looks and language."

"Zoisite has taken it upon himself to…interrogate a few of the immigrants, in your absence." Kunzite's countenance betrays no emotion at his use of this particular euphemism. "He's told me that they don't seem like spies. Or else they're very good ones."

Jadeite ponders that new piece of information. "Either way, it's an intriguing phenomenon, and one that grows by the day. Too many ships leave this harbor. I intend to find out why."

"I wish you luck. Report to me, or one of us, this time – or suffer my consequences." Kunzite's image on the screen instantly blinks out, before the golden general can amicably tell him to piss off.

…

The Far Eastern king has never been much of a dreamer since he learned to bend his power; he supposes it's because his generous gift of illusion provides all the flights of fancy his subconscious could possibly wish for. And anyway, like all longtime soldiers, he sleeps deeply and uninterruptedly whenever he can.

But tonight, Jadeite dreams.

In a graveyard of cremated trees, he looks for his last living quarry. All lights are blown out, but there's not even a pair of eyes remaining between the two of them, anyway. He encounters this sensation only in the ruined spaces she leaves behind. As though she's robbed all his senses, so that he traces her absent shape and fills it wholly with his own deliria. He always gives like that, unreservedly, knowing that somewhere in this place that's fallen out of time, her tangible, beating, red mystery awaits.

…

…

…

…

…

**Weird terms.**

Daishin: great heart/mind/truth, based on the various sources I've read


	4. Master of Illusion Part Three

**Shaken in My Faith: Master of Illusion – Part Three**

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_Tell me why you reach  
__Grasping for my knee, my wrist  
__The ladder on this beach  
__Connecting you to me, like this  
_

-Andrew Belle, _Reach_

…

Sunrise galloped a blue banner across the Elysian sky, and asphodels tilted their faces up to sing its drumming hooves; they made music for those who desired revelry. For others who craved respite from the world, Elysion's endless summer passed in the brief season of a sigh, and sounded no louder.

Jadeite remembers that haven with surpassing clarity.

The oath he swore so long ago, the inviolate promise to the only man he'll ever let himself call master. There, where footsteps were few and favored. There, at Earth's sacred center, bound eternally to its crown Prince. Since that day, the golden general has sought nothing from the field of dreams, but he considers himself lucky to have felt that calm wind caress his hair, stretched out lazily on the temple's bleached steps.

There is peace in the quiet places of the world. But barren silence, Jadeite finds, only breeds more sinister noises.

The Martian Oracle's citadel is no less holy, but its artificial stillness makes him long for the cries of gulls and murmurs of tall grass. Here is a place of thickly encroaching walls and smothering smoke, nothing like the home he's coming to miss too dearly. The only whispers here speak of intrigue, sometimes louder than they ought, as Jadeite passes her closed door.

"…_my_ guest. I'm tired of returning here, finding my Council more deranged than when I left last. What makes them think to interfere in my personal business?"

The witch-queen's scorned his company since yesterday's altercation, and avoids him on suddenly obligatory business. Having been abandoned to his own devices of late, Jadeite can't help but slow his stride when it appears that he's their primary topic of conversation.

…

"I don't wish to interfere, myself, Lady, but as the Fire informed you of his coming, will you tell me when he'll be going?"

Another horrified voice – "_Deimos!_" – but Rahi laughs, unoffended.

"If only I could. But…" she sobers. "I'm starting to worry that no matter how long I delay him here…"

"Is – is the Fire still – " the last attendant ventures, before her mistress cuts her off.

"Nothing. Nothing but his face, Phobos. He's…completely unpredictable."

Deimos snorts. "Maybe the Fire doesn't care for Earthly doings."

"Keep your tongue in your empty head, Deimos." This time, Rahi doesn't laugh. Her swift reproof cracks out precisely, like bone snapped in two. "There are five Far Easterners for every Martian, and Earth now sustains more people than any of us put together, in our little domes. I'd be foolish to not know – and worse, not care for a growing omen when I see one."

"I'm sorry, Lady," Deimos mumbles, subdued.

"I don't know what's worse. The old complacency or the new fear. But he's a harbinger of something, I know that much." She exhales sharply. "If only the Fire would tell me _what_…I don't enjoy meeting him unprepared.

"Don't you?"

There's humor in her voice again. "You seem to have warmed to him, Phobos."

"He makes you smile, Lady." Jadeite can almost see Phobos's studiedly indifferent shrug. "But…his own laughter doesn't reach his eyes. I don't need to tell you this, but be watchful, Lady."

Deimos sounds grim – and alarmingly close to the entrance. "He always is."

…

The portal still ripples the air behind him as she leaves her chambers. Phobos and Deimos have long since gone.

"Lady Rahi."

If it were possible for her to produce a more mutilating stare, Jadeite's sure that even his father and grandfather before him wouldn't have a pair between them. Though he's thought of her name often in the night, he's well aware that not even her attendants dare to use it.

"Names have power, Lord Jadeite," she turns away, dismisses him with a sweep of her eyelashes. It's meant to infuriate, but instead centers him. Coils his resolve. "And here…you have none."

"If names have power, why have you given yours up?" he inquires, falling in beside her smoothly. "Are all Oracles pallid icons, not flesh-and-blood women?"

"Is that what you call camp followers on Earth?" Rahi retorts, speeding her steps. "Bastards don't bear the names of the 'flesh-and-blood' women who birth them, but the fathers who raise them."

"It serves you ill to throw my parentage in my face," Jadeite returns calmly, keeping his eyes steady on the dim hallway before them. "My blood is no more common than yours. Did your mother hide your burning hair and eyes from her village? What name did she cry when the Council tore her daughter from – "

Rahi's palm abruptly slams into the nearest lamp. She doesn't break it – although, peculiarly, the torch behind the glass flares. The general precipitously halts just behind, near a recessed stairwell.

He doesn't need to put a hand to her, to feel that she's held as tightly as scant breath underwater. But when the Oracle releases her words, they convey terrible finality.

"What my mother named me no longer matters, Lord Jadeite. Because the Fire is my father and husband both."

Every instinct urges him to move in. To make her prove it. The shadows are temptingly long here, where dull Martian sky doesn't reach and indolent smoke rises. On Earth, it'd be a place for him to try her certainty with his touch, let her mouth dry at the thud of his heartbeat. But he never makes the same mistake twice, and Rahi's far from what he'd call tolerant. It's crucial that today not be like yesterday, and so Jadeite allows untested principle to divide them.

"You're lucky," he tells her instead. "To be so young, and possess so much conviction. I wish I was as certain of my place – " the words escape before he can reclaim them, and he draws a fortifying breath. "Must we always fight?"

Impossibly, the hallway seems to darken further, like twin candles winking out when Rahi squeezes her eyelids shut.

"It's all I know, too," he agrees with her silence. "But armor's a heavy burden even when you're accustomed to its weight. It's…comforting, isn't it? To find someone who understands you?" Jadeite's about to give away far too much, but it's worth it if his secrets unlock hers. "That's why I can't bring myself to regret years spent fighting. It's what led me to the undying peace of Elysion. To my brothers. My Prince."

"They are dear to you," Rahi whispers, without hesitation or surprise. She's wise to close her eyes, for her voice never trembles as they do. "I can understand that well."

"You see how easy it is, when we speak of what we share." Her red hair stirs even in this stifling place, as though life seethes within. He pictures Elysian wind kindling it under brilliant sun, and the image both thrills and strangely grieves him. "And a Fire that's both father and husband must share your joys and sorrows more than any man could hope to. I'm sorry. For doubting its embrace."

At that last, her eyes flare startlingly open on his, and the girl has vanished. In her place again stands the Oracle.

"Then will you see the Fire, Lord Jadeite?"

It takes him a moment to absorb the meaning of the invitation – yet another unprecedented honor she bestows upon him. And suddenly, Jadeite's curiosity is sparked, in the childish way he usually teases Zoisite for. "My presence isn't forbidden?"

She's already descending the stairs, footfalls swift. "Why should it be? Nobody can divine it but me, though the Fire has its own stray mirages," Rahi adds opaquely.

Jadeite begins, and then forgets to ask what stray mirages when they reach their destination. The Fire's searing intensity, even behind mountainous double doors – it's unlike any heat he's ever felt before. And yet, familiar.

…

He suffers pitifully akin to the unfortunate beasts he used to choose for celebratory feasts, turned on spits until their skins bubbled and crisped. The general tugs off his shirt with a muttered curse. Propriety be damned – the Fire's temperature has no Earthly like, not in the jungles of the subcontinent and not in the desert caravans traversing East to West. He'd leave, but the soaring tower of flame holds him as securely as a lioness mouths her cub, fangs gentle but unmistakably there.

Perspiration dews his chest as Jadeite stares, mesmerized. He understands why his father braved every written and unwritten law for a chance to stand here. The ambitious mercenary was callous, driven, and no less so with his gifted son. But he loved nothing better than to talk of the Oracle's mighty Fire. His father believed the Martian deity's gift of prescience would give them victory over his descendants on Earth. He died believing it, and though Jadeite never misses him, he wishes now that they could speak. He stands as god-king of the Far East, guardian to the Prince, and he's done it without begging the Oracle any favors.

Perhaps this hubris is some seduction of the Fire, he realizes suddenly, chastened. The general's panting slightly, and sweats not just for the heat. He silently admires Rahi's mastery; no fever transports one who is mistress here. As he watches her meditate, the flames' apex curls into talons, and their heart transfixes him, a gaping, deformed maw. A thrown spark of the cremated corpses, not the living specters.

Jadeite's lips part, but no sound emerges.

Rahi turns to him, expression serene, arms loose at her sides – and at his look, glances swiftly back at the Fire. Her eyebrows knit together briefly. Whitish horns scatter in smoke.

"Lord Jadeite?" she questions him, stepping closer. When he doesn't immediately respond, Rahi reaches for his slack arm. "Jadeite? What is it?"

"It – it's nothing," he hesitates, unfamiliar with the sensation. Freed from the Fire's sway, his instincts regain sharpness too late to intercept her.

"What did you see, Jadeite?" she asks gently, but the pressure of her fingertips on his wrist increases. In a flash, he recalls his profitable eavesdropping, her frustration at his puzzling unpredictability.

"Only myself," Jadeite manages. He's collected himself sufficiently to perceive how disappointment heavily weights Rahi's brow. So that's what she plays at, the general deduces rapidly. She'd hoped he'd caught a glimpse of his own future, where she couldn't. Hoped a "stray mirage" of the Fire had shown more than just his face.

Indeed, what familiar demon had writhed there instead?

But Jadeite temporarily shelves those disturbing ruminations, always needing his wits about him to navigate any conversation with her. And Rahi's dissatisfied words bear his suspicions like carrier falcons. "Then you perceived nothing that I didn't."

She tries to sound offhand, but Jadeite knows she will never allow him in this room again. His deception serves him well, and her displeasure serves her right, he reflects amusedly. Goodwill, indeed. If the Oracle's only object in keeping him here is to turn his pages like a book, he's glad he's as much of an enigma to her as she is to him. It's not for nothing that Jadeite's called the master of illusion.

"A stray mirage, as you said," he matches her nonchalance. "When I was a boy at war, such apparitions haunted me without rest."

Rahi gazes up at him, face smooth. "From what I have heard, the only apparition haunting the Far East was you."

Jadeite opens his mouth, but her next words intrigue as they interrupt. "I envy you. Even just riding across those vast swathes, at the head of your armies. Feeling that everything you see is yours."

"I don't feel it. I know everything I see is mine," he smiles, more a baring of teeth, and Rahi's hand drops from his forearm. "Maybe that hot Martian blood makes you envious."

She doesn't back away. "Can you blame me for wanting to leave this castle?" the Oracle challenges. "Even training on the Moon isn't much for excitement. No doubt you've already told your Prince and your brothers what I am, based upon the strength of your suspicions." Her lips curve at his look. "Now that you've revealed you _are_ one of the Shitennou, I wouldn't have you believe I'm defenseless against your might. Did you think I couldn't be honest?"

"Perhaps things would be simpler between us, if there was more honesty," Jadeite answers. The staccato under his ribs, the buzzing in his ears – their constant dueling makes him feel nothing so much as strong, sharp. Vital. "If we're being truthful, Senshi, then tell me what your alliance wants, once and for all. Earth? For their own?"

Rahi looks indignant, but he swiftly overrides her objection. "I can understand that. I am a general, after all, and Earth would be a priceless jewel for any crown. Though your Moon Sorceress might coyly deny it." Jadeite pauses. "But I am also a king, and my people are my conscience. If there's some way for us to negotiate, without spies, without doublespeak, then…I would prevent bloodshed if I could. And so would you."

"Of course," she snaps tersely. "The Moon Queen has always watched over your star, and Mars is no different. You must have perceived, just after a few days spent together – I have no taste for spies or doublespeak." Rahi sucks in an impatient breath and her fists clench hard. "And you _are_ perceptive, Jadeite. So you might have guessed already – that I cannot negotiate with you alone. My Council – "

"To hell with your Council!" Jadeite barks. "_You_ are the Oracle, Rahi! Not by any fortunate accident of blood. _You_ were chosen for this by Mars himself. Who are they to bind your decisions? You and I know what we must do. What we're born for, from dirt to great citadels. Our time is changing, like nothing they've known. Who can guide us?" His hand sweeps the blazing pillar behind them. "You and I are answerable to no one, and so we must make our own choices."

The Fire's muted thunder grows to a roar. Jadeite inhales and exhales harshly, corded vessels cast in high relief – but she scarcely moves, those frightening eyes pensive on his. She is making her own choice even now, he realizes, and all that is left to him is to wait. Even as he spoke, he'd seen how Rahi's taut features stilled, focused sublimely inward like the wash of a dying star. In this moment, everything contracts to a singular, fatal point in her irises, and its vicious pull is the most certain thing Jadeite has ever known.

He barely registers her hand rising to his stubbled jaw, until pressure against his cheek rests, cool and sure. It's odd, how it escaped his notice that she wears only a simple shift, without a circlet or even slippers. Of course, an eager part of him baits, she's only just risen from her warm bed. No wonder the Fire's heat doesn't trouble her, as she steps forward and presses herself against his. Sweat sinks quickly into her clothes, sheens her forearms as she rests their slim bareness against his chest.

Bare feet steal between his when she rises on tiptoe, carefully pulls his forehead down to touch hers.

They linger like this, connate, lucid. Slowly drinking each other's breath, eyelashes tickling and weaving. The inches remaining between them are a path of coals, one he knows they will eventually take – but not just yet. Up close, her incense ceases to madden, filling his lungs as though it had done so always; her cheek is flawlessly carved, like the graven image she's turned him into. It is he who is the pallid icon, and she who shapes him, worships him with her consuming, innocent touch.

"The Council is waiting, Lady. Are you – we heard shouts – _oh_!"

Phobos's punctured gasp shatters the chimera. And yet, not a muscle that he can feel even twitches; she brutally twines his curls and holds him fast. Rahi's quiet command leaves no space for argument, only an unfulfilled promise warm near the corner of his mouth.

"Leave us."

He doesn't hear or see Phobos obey, but she has no option but to disbelievingly back away. The attendant's fragmented sobs echo gradually softer, down the hallway.

It's passed; they both feel it slipping away, and Jadeite can't think why it didn't pass faster. He deliberately straightens, and every straining atom of him immediately balks. Her hand slides downward, and though Rahi doesn't resist being parted from him, her palm comes to rest almost absently over his heart.

"You should go," he tells her, amazed that his voice can still be so ordinary.

Rahi nods, and red hair slips in her eyes, the mantle between a mirror and its reflection. Her fingertips feel abnormally cold on his chest, prickling overheated skin. She sounds both terrible and calm. "I know."

Long after she's left, her presence remains, and sustains Jadeite in this place where the Fire would suffocate him. His eyes parch and burn, but the flames leap blithely, without portent. If even the Oracle cannot fathom his intentions, what hope does he have?

…

"I hear you've found us a Martian Senshi," Nephrite announces a few days later. "So I'll wager he's some candy-ass with a bow, like that Far Eastern pussy brigade you call an army, am I right?"

The last time Jadeite so successfully voided his face of all expression, Nephrite suffered a catastrophic defeat at cards and wore his hair in pigtails – with ribbons – for a month. "She has some skill, though I haven't yet seen it."

His friend's ready stream of foul invective lodges in his throat. Jadeite steeples his fingers, waiting for the multiplicity of odd noises emerging from Nephrite to resemble speech.

"Uhh…she?"

"She."

"Well…shit." His wide, mobile mouth curves slowly, then wickedly. "What are we so worried about, then?"

The dark-haired general's bearing, even hunched over a communicator, is casually patrician. Jadeite remembers how his father forced him to recite courtly speeches by failing campfires, and ponders where Nephrite, born to rank, acquired his remarkably filthy tongue.

"I swear, Jade, when Kunzite told me you'd sniffed out a Senshi, you'd have thought Endy's balls just dropped and he was there to see it happen, he was so damn excited. Well. As excited as Kunzite ever gets, anyway," the other man concedes with a yawn.

"I'd put good money on him lurking in the Prince's bedroom a few years ago, just waiting to capture that tender moment."

"Those two are sweet, aren't they?" he snickers. "Anyway. Jade, what if – what if they're _all_…you know…shes?"

"The Senshi? I don't know. Could be interesting."

"Could be!" Nephrite nearly rubs his hands together with delight. "Don't pretend you're not at least a _little_ entertained by the idea. I know you, you bastard. I'm sure there's already some black-haired wench who fills your eyes and your bed."

"I'm starting to think there aren't enough in yours. You sound like someone's horny grandmother."

"Changing the subject? We're not talking about the Oracle. Kunzite already told me you charmed the old gray pubes off her." Jadeite nearly gives himself whiplash pretending to grab something behind him. Even _his_ poker face has an eventual breaking point. "Come on. What are their women like?" The dark-haired general peers closer, clearly suspecting Jadeite of hiding his concubine army in the screen's immediate vicinity.

"Unlike you, Neph, I'm not suffering under the cheerful delusion – "

"Any exotic Martian…talents I should be jealous of?"

" – that women are good for just one thing."

"I can think of two things they're good for, actually. Three, if you're persuasive," Nephrite's heavy-lidded eyes glint with unholy merriment. "I haven't a clue what's going on in their clever little heads, and hell if I don't love that about them." His friend sits back with a resounding thump, and an infuriating grin. "But you…you know a woman's secrets too easily, Jade, and sometimes I believe you hate them all for it."

"Enough of your philosophy on women, Neph." Jadeite's tenor is light, but so is steel. "When I want my nuts under her heel, I'll seek your wisdom."

"You're more than halfway there, you cocky motherfuck," he leans in, broad shoulders filling the screen. "Whoever this Martian harpy is, she must be some kind of mystery. I hope you're as balls-deep in her as she is in you, because otherwise, I think you're past praying for."

When Jadeite's jaw hardens, Nephrite continues more seriously.

"The stars aren't talking. So I'll just say…don't lose yourself in that maze. I _know_ you, Jade. Don't give what you can't part with."

The absurd irony of Nephrite – _Nephrite_ – counseling caution is the last straw. Jadeite abruptly flips a switch, and the communicator blinks black.

…

…

…

…

…


	5. Master of Illusion Part Four

**Shaken in My Faith: Master of Illusion – Part Four**

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_This is a gift; it comes with a price  
__Who is the lamb and who is the knife?  
__Midas is king and he holds me so tight  
__And turns me to gold in the sunlight_

-Florence + The Machine, _Rabbit Heart_

…

The boy who would become Jadeite – he never thinks of that other name now – was barely eighteen when he first set foot in the Hindu Kush, and claimed dominion over every country east of its peaks. He built a palace of glass at the crossroads of the Middle and Far Eastern lands, and there he welcomed a guest. The most formidable leader of men in any part of the world, the kingmaker who would change his destiny, though the boy didn't know that yet.

He sensed that icy stare piercing deep, as he strode toward the loosed animal – felt it far more than the cheers and whoops of his peacocked court. The struggle was brief. When blood spilled freely over his arms, and the creature's pupils dilated full black, he wondered if he'd passed some unspoken test.

"I've seen kings of the northern islands sacrifice men and not beasts, and yet tonight's ritual proved strange to my eyes," Kunzite commented later as they watched dancers turn their painted feet. "The animal came to you willingly, as though it welcomed its fate."

"It was young," he laughed in response. "Too young to know uncertainty, much less fear it."

"As are you."

"Dangerous in of itself," the boy continued lightly, as though none had spoken. "Like anything that's never been wounded. Never been defeated. It's – "

"Unpredictable," Kunzite murmured in completion.

With that, he drained the dregs of his unwatered wine and stood, head and shoulders above most of their company.

The hand extended was firm. Warm. So now were the silvered eyes.

"I will remember that. Welcome, Jadeite."

The boy inclined his golden head, and others milling nearby gossiped eagerly, curious why their young king acknowledged the welcome of an unknown guest in his own palace.

…

More and more, Jadeite thinks Rahi akin to that animal. Akin to him, though they are so different. Perhaps she doesn't understand what drove her to reach up and caress his face before the Fire, what stakes could by lost by it, but she doesn't retreat from her action. That fierce will guiding them, once fixed upon its course, has something of predestination in its unshakable surety.

As days pass, the Far Eastern king doesn't forget the purpose to which he's come, but pushing her too hard now would upset the delicate balance they've struck. So instead, they allow themselves to forget about Senshi and spies for this interlude. Often Jadeite must be storyteller enough for them both, and yet her eyes impart their own rapt eloquence.

It's heady, thrilling – how he alone coaxes her low laughter, how she impatiently swats away his teasing with her hand. Sometimes, he seizes it, cool fingers crushed in his grip, and she doesn't jerk away, testing him with the throw of her shoulders, the heat of her smile. Rahi does nothing archly or accidentally; there's not a deceptive part of her body, and so he finds his own desire mirrored in even her subtlest gestures.

She comes unafraid, and they circle each other without wavering or retreating, knowing the inevitable collision will be less gentle than this. Privately, he must confess that Nephrite has some wisdom (well concealed) under all that brawn. For Jadeite no longer knows who is the beast, and who is the blade.

…

The only sense left to him is sound. In nothingness, he hears nothing closing in all around him, a yawning black mouth without tongue or teeth.

Jadeite awakens with a strangled gasp, disoriented and unseeing in the dark. He reaches up reflexively, hurls the intruder beneath him, thumb digging into windpipe.

The general barely registers the candles suddenly blazing into being, his nightmare still clinging to him like acrid smoke from their wicks.

But his prize makes no attempt to free herself, sharpness of her hip biting into his inner thigh. Jadeite focuses half-dazed upon the rough hand wrapping her long throat, from where not the smallest mewl has escaped. He can already see where the bruises will yellow, even as his thumb traces those hazy shapes.

And yet Rahi's gaze tangling unashamedly with his – is strangely unfazed.

"I think you've the touch of Midas, sometimes."

The sound of her voice does it. He kicks his feet over the opposite side of the mattress, breathing too hard. Buries his face in trembling fingers, in a bid to keep them from her skin.

"Why's that?" he manages brusquely.

Gauzy robes twist around calves and slip from shoulders. As she rises from his mussed bed, Jadeite's eyes fill darkly, her unconscious sway like a kick in the teeth.

"Desiring what you shouldn't," Rahi fiddles absently with the communicator, and the general raises an eyebrow. Is she talking about him or herself? "The insolence to take it anyway."

"Midas was bold, you must admit that. Doors only stay shut to cowards." He crosses the floor quickly, stops her movement with a hand over hers. "And it's an odd hour that you've come to open mine."

"Get dressed and come along," the witch-queen orders peremptorily, knuckles flexing under his. "There's something I must show you."

"Couldn't you have a servant summon me?" he murmurs, and feels with pleasure how she leans into him, with neither coyness nor cognizance.

"Phobos and Deimos might have woken you with a knife in your belly, so I came myself," she answers. Probably accurate. Thankfully, no sign of the harpies since Phobos caught them by the Fire.

"But where are the rest?"

Her tone hardens. "I have little use for servants in the first place. Especially those who watch me too closely. The Council's eyes have no place in my castle."

He wisely avoids that subject. "Next time, you might send another instead of ambushing me yourself. I've survived too many assassination attempts, you know. You're lucky I don't keep a weapon in my sleep."

"I need no weapon to defend myself, certainly not from you," Rahi returns coolly. "And I didn't ambush you. I knocked. Several times. You were…" her brow furrows slightly. "Dreaming too deeply."

Jadeite remembers.

Though it's as garbled as all waking recollections are. A tangle of scarlet on loathsome wind, shafts of flame blossoming from abscessed carcasses at his feet. And then a great nullity, more terrible than all the macabre parade before it.

"Not likely. I never dream," he tells her. "Give me a few minutes, and I will join you outside."

…

Having navigated every dimmest tunnel of her citadel, they finally emerge upon a spacious balcony. Open to the Martian horizon, washed in umbered daybreak. Here, the Far Eastern king can appreciate just how loftily her fortress rises above all else. The world below their feet is nothing but bare sky and rock, like Kailash of legend.

Even under this seemingly boundless sphere, Jadeite finds a barren harshness to the landscape, an eerie lack of motion. Driest air has no flavor, and dusty stone no give. Of course, the great life domes remain the other planets' mightiest displays of advancement, but as far as the general's concerned, they blanch in comparison to Earth's jeweled verdancy.

"Here upon the highest peak," he observes. "Where Mars made a home like his father's."

The Oracle glances over. "I've heard yours is in the mountains as well. Walls of glass seem boastful. To say the least."

"They call it the palace of illusions," Jadeite's gaze remains fixed upon the rusted cliffs. "As my enemies learn the hard way."

She'd probably ask more, but then – "Look – !"

"That's what I wanted to show you." The general follows her pointed finger. "Do you see – see those blemishes on the sun's surface?"

A rising sun more distant than he's accustomed to. "Who hasn't? They've been there for years."

"Obviously," the witch-queen sniffs. "But since when, exactly?"

"Six or seven years ago, perhaps," the Far Eastern king's mystified as to where her line of inquiry goes. "On Earth, they were considered inauspicious at first, but…"

"But…" she prompts.

"Nothing came of it. We celebrated enough that year to last us a lifetime, I'd say." His voice warms to the memory. "My commander finally took a wife, and those revelries lasted…far longer than they should've."

Neph throwing bags of gold to any wench who'd show the resigned groom her tits. Zoisite purring such poisonous gossip into little Thetis's ears that she blushed for days. And he more richly decorated than the richest bride, to boot. Endymion, whole face aglow as he threw his arms around Kunzite, now his brother by blood. "But their wedding brought me before the Prince for the first time. And then…the five of us bound together an alliance. Such that none on Earth had ever honored before."

"Can it be a coincidence, Jadeite?" her voice is soft, but steady. "That as the last of the Shitennou joined the High Court, the first of the Senshi awoke among us?"

The Oracle rests her elbows on the balustrade, expression distant. "There are…forces working around us that we can't command. Things awakening that haven't slept long enough – "

"I don't believe in superstitions," Jadeite interrupts her, even as the talons of the Fire lengthen before his mind's eye.

"You should." Her knuckles whiten over the railing. "I've discovered why your borders swarm with Martians, Jadeite."

…

Contours of the other planets' governments are mostly unstudied on Earth, and Jadeite's knowledge of the Martian Council comes only from spotty intelligence and what he's gleaned of his subjects, who set up similar elder authorities when they first arrived in the Far East, long before anyone can remember. Still, he knows enough. If the Oracle is the voice of Mars, a remote icon – then the Council is her interpreter, envoys to her people. They find and raise her to rule; the first men she sees when her eyes spark, and the last when they finally smolder out. Personally, Jadeite finds it ridiculous, that old men make any pretense of obeying a girl they've reared almost from birth. Perhaps in a time before recollection, the Council faithfully followed their Oracle's will, but it's clear that Rahi's relationship with them has been contentious since her tongue found words to sting with.

"Banished." The general feels her eyes scraping his face, where more of his feelings show than he would prefer.

Outside, a dust storm gathers and brings oddly early evening. From her cautious tone, his features must bear accord with its wild fury, how it pounds its fists against the fortress's walls.

"Tensions have never run higher," the witch-queen explains quietly. "We've heard talk of Earth-magic, where none was before." She doesn't check if he'll deny it. "The Senshi drill harder every day. Mars wants to be ready for – for – "

"Your Council extorts their allegiance. To fight if – when war breaks out," he finishes bluntly.

She nods. "From all Martians. So those who refuse to swear the oaths…"

A muscle tics annoyingly in his temple. He resists the urge to ram a fist into it. "Seven years of this. There must be well over a hundred thousand outlaws in the Far East by now."

"Less in the beginning – but their numbers on Earth increased as paranoia on Mars did," Rahi continues darkly. "My advisors load more ships every day with those they've labeled defectors. And – and they're easy to point fingers at, Jadeite. Most of them…don't take kindly to orders. Convicts, prisoners – "

Jadeite inhales sharply. "Sending us your damned _criminals_ – "

" – wherever they choose to go…my Council pretends not to know or care."

"Wherever they _choose_ – " he breaks off. "What other planet will harbor them? Is the Far East to become your penal colony?"

Rahi's chin edges forward. "They go there because of the Martian legend, not because we send them – "

"Or because everyone knows it's a lawless land ruled by a bastard king, isn't that right? With your one hand, you fill our cities with this garbage – and with your other, you mass your alliance's finest armies against Earth," Jadeite can tell when her eyes widen that there's now unaccustomed fire in his, too. "Because we _dare_ to gain strength, and you'd have us always on our knees, wiping our fucking chins – "

"Believe me, Jadeite, I didn't know!"

"Then end it!"

"I would if – ! Do you expect I'd turn a blind eye to something like this?" Rahi bursts out furiously, and of course she's not lying. But he needs a target right now, badly, and her easily roused temper makes her too convenient. "I'm with my Princess more than my people! How must that look? My advisors do things they would never dare to, were I not bound up with the Moon!"

Oh, he's tired of stagnant stone halls, this place without a fleck of real blue or green to it. Of nightmares that break his rest and the feel of her both too close and too far. His customary temperance is fraying too quickly, and he can't do a damn thing about it. "Tell me, does the Moon sanction this as well?"

"The Queen has little authority in Martian matters, and the more time I spend with her, the more I become a figurehead." The Oracle's shoulders sag. "All my life I've never seen the Council so hysterical. Ignorance and suspicion make them mad."

The Far Eastern king scarcely hears her, forehead resting in his shaking palm as he tries to tease some logic out of his skittering thoughts. Endymion would offer his own carefully considered counsel, if he were here. Would look him in the eye and tell Jadeite he trusted him. The general needs a measure of faith more than anything right now.

"I must go back."

"And do what?" Rahi demands as he jerks away from the opposite wall, raking through disheveled hair. "Tell your Prince? You could do that from here."

"If your Council had their way, we barbarians would never find out your treachery!"

"They don't know what I've told you, Jadeite," her voice is hushed. "And they don't tell me what company to keep. Stay."

"I have what I came for." His, by contrast, is raw. "It's time I returned to my kingdom and my liege."

Her signet ring knocks against the door behind her, a metallic clang. "My responsibilities aren't less than yours. A few days won't change anything."

"You haven't much talent for deception, do you? I'd be packed off tomorrow, if your flames could answer all you want to ask of me."

She blanches slightly. "How the hell do you know that?"

"Can you deny it?" As he might have expected by now, Rahi holds fast as he advances on her with all the deliberation of a baited bull. "If only your Fire could give you what you seek. We might have found more pleasant ways of drawing each others' blood."

"I won't ask you again – "

"Why? Too proud?" he taunts as he comes to a halt, perilous inches away. Her faintest leap of breath, a tremble of the lips that makes him wet his own, against almost maddening hunger. "If you tell me why you really want me to stay, I might accept – "

"You will accept." In dusk falling dimly around them, the Oracle's irises glitter like torches of a distant city. "You already have."

Jadeite has no real sense of who closes that fraught space.

It's his palms crushing silk to the hollow of her spine, yanking handfuls of hair back as he opens her soft mouth to his. But it's her fingers curling precisely at his neck, scorching the flesh; her stomach brushing his straining cock before pulling back, forcing him to helplessly follow. The wan sliver of twilight between their bodies winks out when Jadeite catches her hips and hauls her up against the door.

And then it's her gasp against his lips that makes him wonder with the dreamy abstraction of a man who doesn't care anymore. Makes him wonder if she's more – or less – afraid than even he knew.

Less, he finds, when long legs part enough for him to brace her weight over his hard thigh, where he feels heavy heat, hears the moan in her throat that flickers his eyes open. This close, her irises appear so vivid that he imagines he stands in the primeval heart of her, like the red-pouring sun. When his eyelids fall shut again, that heart flops moistly against his hand – spasms in his grip like an eviscerated fish.

Jadeite's hands fall nervelessly from her body.

Rahi immediately slides down the door's length, arms tightening instinctively around him. "Jade – ?" she exhales.

He swiftly averts his face from hers, panting harder than he should.

In the awkward silence that ensues, she swallows audibly. "Was…did I…?"

" – what?" and it takes the shaken general a second or two to understand, before the completely foreign note of uncertainty in her voice suddenly makes sense to him. A self-conscious flush high on her cheekbones is barely visible in lamplight.

The general snaps out of his stupor, focusing once more upon the girl watching him with apprehension. " – Ah – no, it's nothing to do with you," his low chuckle is slightly pained as he reaches for her again. "No, you're…"

Callused fingers trail a vein where her heart hammers against their tips. Jadeite bends his blond head to hers, hears a sigh.

"…far beyond anything I imagined," he breathes into the ticklish place his fingers have abandoned. Feels her melt satisfyingly back into him, and then immediately tense again.

"But then what…?" muffled against his collarbone, but Jadeite hears the wary note all the same, and resigns himself. To an unguarded moment lost by his own error.

"Don't trouble yourself," the assurance is strained and unconvincing to even his ears. "Just…a memory of something."

"Was it – was it your nightmare?" and suddenly his face is between Rahi's palms. Though her lips are temptingly raw from his stubble, breath still hitching from their closeness, those eyes search his without girlish timidity. "This morning, you were just this…" she digs for the word. "Distraught."

"As I said, I don't have dreams," Jadeite grits out the untruth, cursing how she makes a bullseye of it every goddamn time. "There was no nightmare."

"_Don't_ patronize me," she hisses unexpectedly. "I saw your face when I woke you! You know I don't have much patience, and even less for liars."

The hands around his jaw are uncomfortably hot as the Oracle forces him to meet her hellish stare.

"It's your turn to choose, Jadeite."

And before the general can seize her, she's slipped too easily from his arms and slammed the door shut behind her.

…

Her face on the screen isn't at all expected, but still welcome nonetheless. Weary lines around his eyes relax.

"Shirking your lessons as always, princess?"

Thetis giggles. "Lord Zoisite owes me a bet. I knew you'd say that. Shall I fetch him?"

"Where is he?"

"The dungeons."

"Ah," the Far Eastern king thinks better of sending a teenager below to observe Zoisite's particular brand of handiwork. "Why don't you keep me company instead?"

"You look fatigued, my lord," Thetis stretches her fingers toward the screen as though to touch his, and then draws them back hastily. "Lord Nephrite says the Martian women are very tiring."

"Does he, now?" the general struggles to conceal his quivering lips. "No, Thetis, I've just been…having nightmares of late."

The girl sits up in alarm, nearly knocking over the device altogether. "But you don't ever dream!"

"No, Jade," a soft voice emerges behind her, cool and sure as a knife through marrow. "You don't."

A hand brushes Thetis's dark head, and Jadeite just barely catches a flaking rust-hued spot under an adorned knuckle. "Run along, little one. But don't think we're done practicing – I want to see pools, not puddles."

She nods obediently, scurries off, and then eyes like sharp green glass meet directly with flaming blue.

"You'll have to do something about her," the druid king remarks offhandedly. "The girl's more in love with your pretty face every day."

"I've no interest in children, and our commander's stepchildren besides," the satire of Zoisite complimenting a pretty face is not lost on him. "Turns my stomach to consider it, so let's move on. I need to talk to you."

"Of course," the younger general's lackadaisical manner changes utterly, all dead seriousness before Jadeite can even blink. "What's this about you dreaming again?"

"The first nightmare happened the evening I reported to Kunzite. I…thought it peculiar, but assumed it was a fluke of some sort. And then…last night…the same vision…" he trails off.

"You haven't dreamed in…it must be, what, a dozen years now? And have you _ever_ dreamed the same thing twice?" Zoisite's tone is incredulous. "Is it something to do with Martian magic?"

"Exactly my point. I think…" he sucks in a deep breath. "I think these nightmares come from the Fire."

The druid king's earful of silver glints as he tilts his head curiously. "Isn't that a question for the Oracle?"

"It is and it isn't. I'll be brief, as I don't have much time. Listen closely."

"Speak."

…

During a far earlier conversation, as they strolled in her (pitifully artificial) garden, Jadeite managed to extract a little information from the reticent Oracle on a subject that attracted him. One that always had, actually, since his father told him about it first, and especially after experiencing it himself. The Fire.

"I always believed only the Oracle could divine its shapes."

She shrugged gracefully. "Mars is the star of omen, and the Fire its heart. Everyone who steps onto this soil feels that power, whether greater or lesser. Waking or sleeping, we all see things. I'm just the closest to its core."

"Like my Prince to Elysion," he reasoned.

"You'd know better than me. But that's why my dreams and visions almost always predict accurately. Only I can fully bend the Fire to my will."

"And what about the things others see?" Another subject close to Jadeite's heart, as he recalled the demon he'd found grinning in those flames.

"Those, too, can be prophecy. Sometimes. But they usually tell more about the seeker than what he seeks. His fantasies instead of his future." The witch-queen shifted uncomfortably. "Many Martians go mad, for the Fire will rule you if you don't rule it."

"Like any great power," the general mused, reminded of his own tricks.

…

He quickly sketches his whole understanding of the Fire, expecting that the younger man will fill in the right details and ask the correct questions. Their conversations are often like this, hummingbirds darting from bloom to bloom, for the golden general's always had to think quickly on his feet, and Zoisite's sheer analytical force is unmatched by anyone else he's met. The Far Eastern king's no great schemer, only sharply observant; he realizes his shortcomings, and so turns to his friend's flawlessly cold, clear-eyed counsel.

And of course, his irises don't even flicker when Jadeite describes the gruesomeness of his nightmares. The other reason he seeks out the wholly unsqueamish royal executioner.

"I don't remember all the details at once, only haphazardly as hours pass. How dreams often are. And what I do remember is…unwise for me to reveal to her," he recalls Rahi's careful scrutiny.

"I can understand why," Zoisite agrees slowly, mulling over his words. "But you said yourself that your nightmares may not _actually_ predict anything…"

"What if they do?" the Far Eastern king counters. "What if they predict some invasion of Earth?"

"And it's tactless to inquire if they might murder us all in our beds?" he smiles disarmingly. "Or maybe the Oracle will assume the reverse? That we mean to attack them?"

Jadeite's laugh is unpleasant. "I'm not sure she'd reach either conclusion. The witch-queen can't spy anything in her Fire, apparently – not where I'm concerned."

"Intriguing blind spot," Zoisite murmurs. "So the less she knows about you, the better. I see your game." He leans in, fiery curls meshing with his lashes. "You're sure these aren't the dreams of your childhood? Illusions turned loose upon their master, before you learned to control them?"

"I'm sure, because…" Jadeite tries to decide if he should drop another anvil, and figures he's in deep enough now. "Zoi, what I saw in the Fire – and what I see in my nightmares. They're the same devil."

"_You_ saw the Fire? For yourself?" His lips curve in a way the Far Eastern king doesn't exactly like. "The Oracle must have become terribly fond of you."

Jadeite's senses sharpen too late. "She and I have…an understanding," he responds warily.

"Indeed," Zoisite smirks, taking his time. "The Martians I've…conversed with have been very informative. She must be much lovelier than the wrinkled hag you met as a boy. And hardly older than Thetis, isn't that right, Jadeite?"

He's still for a moment. "Fuck you, you – "

"You can lie to those two – the Prince, maybe. Not me," the other laughs blithely. "Thumbscrewing out secrets is a fond pastime of mine. Did you forget that I've been dealing with your Martian infestation since you left?"

Jadeite calls on whatever drops are left in that once famously full reservoir of patience. Today has been a very trying day. "Have you told anyone, you preening piece of shit?"

"That the Oracle is a girl instead of a crone, or that you're probably fucking her?" he snickers. "Why _else_ would you keep her youth from us?"

"Don't talk, druid king. I've heard of your freakish northern ceremonies. You've probably taken corpses and who knows what else to bed."

Amusement still plays around the corners of Zoisite's mouth. "Really, I hope you haven't. With her, I mean; the corpse is something quite different. It'd be rather impolitic, what with her vow of chastity and all. Diplomatic suicide."

"Your faith in my judgment is inspiring."

"It's not that," the younger general replies quietly, lacing thickly jeweled long fingers together, changing his mood like his baubles. "It's just – you have an insolence. A way of rushing to meet fate. And then, a way of brilliantly cheating it."

Jadeite cracks his shoulders. "The second time I've been called too bold today. What do you suppose the life of a general is? A real one, not a lord sitting in his castle and disemboweling men in shackles?"

Zoisite ignores the provocation. "So you've the audacity to seize what you want. Maybe you haven't learned yet that you shouldn't want everything. You know your limitations. Not your limits."

"Should I have limits? Because I was born a whore's son and not a king?"

"Your words, Jade, not mine." Light dances off his torc as he leans back. "Neph was right, you're too far in this fire – and he doesn't even know what I do. Let's pray you can escape as you always have."

When Jadeite regains use of his voice, it's lethally calm. "Round up as many Martians as you can find in the Far East. Don't harm them. I mean to deal with them myself upon my return."

"I thought Kunzite already told you. They're not spies."

"I know what they are," he smiles grimly at Zoisite's look of surprise. "Perhaps you can interrogate them – gently, Zoi – if you wish to learn more."

The other man considers. "At least tell me about this – this Senshi of the Moon. What is she to your Oracle? Are Martian and Lunar interests so closely aligned as – "

"My secrets will remain mine, this once."

The device blanks at Jadeite's touch.

So much for that. His nightmares remain his too, and with nothing else to show for it.

…

…

…

…

…

Is it wrong that I imagine their communicators to be like little iPads? Probably _

**Stuff to know.**

By the way, I'm not making any claims of historical accuracy here. I haven't even really placed this in a time period – I'm gonna go ahead and say it's pre-civilization as we know it, a la manga SilMil, but I like picking up fun little mythological and geographical threads from real timelines, so it's going to be all over the place :D

Hindu Kush – range of mountains between central Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. "Kush" usually translates in some form to "killer" (awesomely cheerful name for a geographical feature)

Midas – everyone knows about the guy who wished for the ability to make everything he touched gold, and then accidentally turned his food, water, and daughter into solid metal, but just in case…oops? Interestingly, there's also a myth surrounding Midas and the Far East (sort of). Midas rode into town on a wagon…just as the townspeople had decided their king would be the next guy who rode into town on a wagon. The new king dedicated his wagon to their god as a sort of tribute, and tied it to a post. Whoever could untie the knot, it was said, would become the next king of Asia. Historically, this next king was to be Alexander the Great…

Kailash – part of the Himalayas in Tibet. Mountain said to be the home of Shiva (Mangala's, or Mars's father)

Palace of illusions – a reference to the glass palace built by the heroes of the Mahabharata, the Pandava princes…it was mostly glass and water, and they laughed hysterically at the sorry fuckers who stepped on glass in their swimming trunks, and then walked into pools with all their clothes on 3

Torc – twisted metal necklace, looks like a collar, worn in early Celtic Europe (think Gaul, Saxony, Belgica, Britanica)


	6. Master of Illusion Part Five

**Shaken in My Faith: Master of Illusion – Part Five**

…

…

…

…

…

_And call it love or call it murder  
__Kill me quietly  
__Close the door and take it further  
__Where no man has been_

-Lykke Li, Silent My Song

…

He's heard the whispers of their subjects. That the five of them are so different, they could only be drawn together by their shared lust for power. For secret sorcery, and perhaps even more secretly, for each other. The gods obviously fought over what clay to shape them with – how can it be that they don't fight amongst themselves?

For the men of the High Court, there's little mystique to it. Really, if there's anything they bear in common, Jadeite broods darkly as he stares at the communicator – it's an unholy love for taking the piss out of each other. He's not quick to anger, but this'll be the last he hears his comrades tell him – for the umpteenth time – that he's in over his head.

What else did they expect from Mars? It's brought the Far Eastern king black news, blacker nightmares, and if there's more elusive quarry than its witch-queen…oh, he hopes it never lures him. A towering rampart of half-truths and secrets, they clambering up one side, she the other. In the absence of Zoisite's pointed visage, Jadeite sees his own reflected, sees what they must see. Hair disheveled, face drawn and lined, usual smile absent.

So they think to tell him he's knee deep in shit? His comrades haven't the half of it.

Or…maybe they do. Maybe that's why they fret over his doings here, like wives left home to wilt. The general smirks at nothing in particular, sprawls long legs in his chair as the deepest hour settles around him.

Because if they know him well – they know there's nowhere else he'd rather be.

Brokering peace with the planet of war was always going to be a fool's errand. What of it? He's held men's throats – and been held by his own – enough to understand this much: he's at his best when others are at their worst. Intrigue was conceived in a Far Eastern bed, after all. I'll eat these snakes and speak with their tongues, like always, Jadeite promises the unresponsive device as he turns away. And then – you'll eat your doubts, brothers.

The Oracle's fortress deadens, and the double moons wane. Though he's gone relentlessly and arrogantly forward all his life – tonight, he lets his musings wander backward. To the peoples and places he's adopted as his own, though his face betrays him as no Far Eastern stock. To their legend of a man who left Earth to chase chance. Wasn't Mars himself rewarded for his nerve? he ponders. After all, he was made patron deity of this burning star. But he was the son of a deity too, and Jadeite's just the brat of a soldier and a whore.

Cold dawn finds the golden general contemplating dying coals. Eyes catching their glint, sharp blue points in retreating shadows.

It seems the way before him was mapped only once before. And that too, by a god.

Should that stop me? he thinks, and rises with a smile white in the dark.

…

Little mention was made of the Oracle's troth before he left Earth. It was simply understood, accepted as black soil and bright stars. Coarse sayings abound in Far Eastern guard posts – jealous Mars chooses his bride; jealous Mars keeps her denied. Since arriving here, Jadeite's cuckolded the god so, he's even speculated his nightmares might be punishment rather than prophecy.

Still, the Fire has yet to smite him down for making such a mockery of it.

The path is familiar to him; the foreboding is not. But...the last time he ventured this way was before he laid greedy hands on the Fire's chosen. This time, Jadeite feels raw menace even before he flattens his palms on the searing double doors. Locks bigger than he is scream apart with his last ounce of muscle. The general throws open the entryway, and the din of metal and wood heralds his arrival.

His eyes fall upon the Oracle where she stands in front of her Fire. Her form wafts dark before a wall of orange, almost of its making. But she is real, flesh, for Jadeite sees she's as unslept as he. Those billowing robes are the same he molded to the curve of her, only hours before. This lends him boldness.

"Where are your twin pets?" He bolts the latch behind him. "I guessed they'd guard this door above all others."

Rahi doesn't turn to face him. "Phobos and Deimos have gone."

They'd crawl into his bed – together – before willingly leaving their mistress's side. Must've been one hell of a falling out. He leans against the entryway, his relaxed stance agreeable. His smile, less so.

"You are left alone with me, then."

The voice of the witch-queen carries effortlessly over the fiery roar, though his is barely audible. Detached yet immediate, like she speaks into his ear without wind.

"No, Jadeite," she replies. "You are left alone with me."

A bark of laughter escapes. "Your Fire couldn't have possibly found itself a colder bitch for a mistress. I'd sheathe those claws, if I were you. The secrets we want of each other aren't ours to give, so why keep bluffing?"

"This is how we were born, and what we were born for," the Oracle answers obliquely. "If you dream darkly, Jadeite, it's because night is falling all around us."

"So we see by light on our teeth and curdle the dirt with our blood. Is this what you bade me stay for? More of the same?" He uncoils from the doorway. "We could be so much better."

She makes no reply, but her silence tells. They both feel the stakes raised. The Senshi can keep her hand of secrets; after all, he's been courting less likely odds from the start.

"We could," Jadeite repeats, striding forward. "We could be happy – "

"Not for long," she overrides swiftly. "Not forever."

"Nothing lasts forever." He pauses, and his eyes are the blue of chill sun on tall peaks. "Even vows break, when they lose meaning for their makers."

It's not hard to imagine her lip curling. "Of course you'll tell me to – "

"Tell you? Don't flatter me. It was in this chamber that I said to you – your choices are your own."

"Oh, I know you well," she murmurs. "You'll wait until I walk to you myself – like the devil. But my vow is my only birthright. If you had one to call your own...would you part from it so easily?"

"You were the one to put your hand to my face, right here before your Fire," he reminds her mercilessly, and Rahi continues as though he'd said nothing at all.

"I've watched you smile and pretend to be soft. And I'm no fool. You won't reach out to take something, but you won't leave without it taken." Now he strains to hear her whisper. "That is the cruelty in you. I saw it from the first…and yet I…"

"Cruelty is all you know how to respect," he returns baldly, and the truth slips from him before he understands its simple import. "I'm only what you make me, Rahi."

Their shadows flit over the walls, and move more than they. Just a few paces back, he lets her judge his proximity, his heat. The Far Eastern king recalls the impervious chill of her touch when they stood here last. But even where he's halted behind her, his skin begins to peel and blister.

Silence has a sound of its own, pitiless as wind in the dunes.

"Come here," she commands quietly.

Abstruse, angry waves soak through his clothes as he closes the distance. The Fire's sullen spite blots from the corners of his consciousness, but it makes Jadeite wonder, even as he reaches for her.

Wonder if what they do here, now, is defy fate. Or succumb to it.

…

She's still, at first. Contained, as his hands cradle the line of her neck, toy in the dip of her collarbone. He notes the unblemished smoothness of her arms, and then the rash of goosebumps when her sleeves slip downward. The high, tight breasts, and then the nipples budding to the air when her robes sigh to the floor, unprotesting.

Just behind, he lets both hands come around her waist. In this dim inner sanctum, all the delicate swells and shallows of her gleam, subdued, like the inside of a shell. The general bends his head deliberately, presses his lips to the white shoulder he's bared. Now, she trembles and cannot stop; it rushes out like blood in the water.

"Don't – "

Rahi breaks off; fine hairs raise on her nape where he kisses her, and meanders.

"Don't play," she shudders more than speaks. "You know what I want. Don't play."

His words are lost in her seeking mouth, open, urgent. He groans as her palm slides behind his head, as her tongue slides against his. If the girl's unsure – and she must be – she doesn't show it by being shy. He can't think if her haste better reveals or conceals her inexperience, for suddenly he can't think at all past his aching cock jutting into the small of her back. Her eyes snap up, challenging, and something passes unspoken between them.

Not love words. Those, he knows, are for lovers.

Jadeite loses no time, filling his palm with the lush weight of her breast, the other parting her shifting thighs. A tense hiss explodes in the humid space between their lips, as Rahi grinds into his slickening hand – then bucks against the vise of his forearms, when his fingers hook inside her, and hold. He's imagined this, too many times to count, but even his most fevered imagining fails him, for now it's spiraled like smoke out of his hands.

What's in his hands will serve. His thumbnail scrapes over her hardened nipple, not really by accident; a third finger in, he feels her squeeze, once, hard – he'll guess that's pleasure, not pain. But he's past caring, and she never did. Jadeite yanks her around by the wrist, too rough, and his mouth dries as bone when he sees her face. Her palms are cool on his chest; the floor's like a bed of embers when his back thuds onto it. The general tends to forget the illogical strength in those soft arms, but perhaps due to a closeted love of pain, it never fails to excite him.

To make his blood catch – and burn.

The curtain of her hair falls around them, encloses the thickening rasp of their breath, the restless tangling of their limbs. Curious fingernails etch out the sinews under his skin, a promise she makes unawares, a promise he'll make her keep. He tries for a ragged mouthful of air, but Rahi knocks it out of him when her fingers free his cock from his remaining clothes, not even bothering to strip them. Jadeite grabs for her, but she pulls back – then suddenly, too suddenly, she's straddled his hips, soaking the head of him with dripping heat, and in the Fire's thrown shadow, the girl's face is pale and certain.

"Wait," Jadeite bites out, reaching for a scrap of his vanished restraint, reaching for her. He jerks upright. Sweat sluices and stings down his spine, a shock, and he has no memory of how he let things get this far, this fast. "Wait, don't – "

"Hush," she breathes, curling her thumb over his bottom lip, and then has difficulty saying more. Rahi's eyelids squeeze shut, then blink apart. What wells there does nothing to diminish their fire. "I – "

His mouth seals over hers as he takes her in one unsparing movement.

Whatever noise Rahi might have made is smothered altogether; red pooling on his tongue and lashes wetting his cheeks go wholly ignored. Jadeite pauses just long enough to take hold of her hips, gripping harder when she edges away – and drives upward again, fucks her without asking or stopping. Pain, she understands intuitively –but oh, the gods help him if he dares show her pity.

Fitful panting beats out a staccato against his lips, moisture sheening abdomen and thighs; even more at the apex where he spreads the slippery fold with his thumb, and wishes it were his tongue instead. He listens to her fierce cries, loosed loud above the blood baying in his ears. Feels those fingernails fulfill their promise, ripping skin off his nape as she clenches rhythmically around his cock. Soon, Jadeite tells the girl silently.

A lazy twinge, then the first tremor takes him without warning. He quells it, barely, and perspiration breaks fresh on his body.

Jadeite shifts his grip and fills her, deeper, until she nearly sobs without words in response. The whole of her shakes in his arms, feral, but he knows better than to catch her face between his palms, catch the defenseless moment when she comes for him. As Rahi's eyes widen sightless and her lips part soundless, he buries his head in the damp hollow of her neck and lets her thrash against him, tighten around his length in quick, small spasms, then ebb.

His movements pick up speed in her wake, muscles bunching, going completely rigid – he distantly hears her high, harsh breathing even as his growl brands her skin – and then he spills hot into her.

They remain entwined out of exhaustion; he's indolent, not wanting to ease out of her body just yet. Air heavy with salt and sex; under his nose, red locks sticking with sweat – and yet Jadeite scents something wooded, something that's always struck him as oddly familiar. Perfume? – no. His eyelids fall, weighted by a sleepless night, and then it occurs to him. Incense she dries her hair over, he absently realizes, like he's seen women at the palace do on their latticed balconies. Sometimes his.

He inhales deep, and all thoughts scatter like dandelion seeds on wind. In his drowsy, sated state of mind, it seems she and he could be far from here, far from themselves. And what a mundane luxury that would be, he muses idly, smoothing a wisp from her brow.

We could be better, his own urging recalled as Jadeite lets weariness drag them to the floor, Rahi's chest swelling and falling evenly against his, the oval of her face more peaceful than he's ever seen it. We could. And our way, too, could be gentle.

…

Everything contracts to its inevitable pinpoint, as he and she knew it would. Their hours were never their own, and so something of an unsaid truce holds firm, for now their hours are all they own. Transience presses upon them, tangible; all else falls away.

That night in his bed, and every night thereafter, they talk little, and tarry less.

Having raced past the irrevocable thing he'd pursued since he saw her first…it seems perverse to slow now. But the Far Eastern king is no boy, to maul his prize against doors and floors. The particular nature of an illusionist's magic has taught him to take time and observe well. It's a talent honed for many purposes, some more enjoyable than others. In the course of passion, she astonishes him with her intricacy anew. And so, Jadeite learns her better than he's learned anyone before.

Rahi's like that too, but with different motivations. All petulance and irritation as her hands fly uncertain. One of those who despises doing anything unless she does it best. Unsurprising. So he teaches her to touch him, when really, he'd rather throw her on her back and feast for himself. For days. But in this, he learns as well. Glide of scarlet skimming his thighs, something he recalls fantasizing about when they met. The smile of a tigress when he groans for her, a satisfied turn of lips. Seeing her tongue roam only fuels another urge. To use his own, and make her beg.

They recognize it in each other; like exhaling, the violence in them both rears up time and again. It's how they remind themselves they're unscathed. This is how he comes to memorize the taste of her skin, warm and copper where he applies teeth. Savoring between her legs like blossoms and brine, senses heightened to agony when fists wrench in his curls. And she's gaining on him, too, but she'll never take him apart with the obsessive detail that he does her. He could lose his mind and still put her together again, a bright mirage almost clearer than reality. A sheet of illusory water that shivers when he cups his hands and mouth right, and drinks.

All this, he expected. Bites and scrapes are showy souvenirs, easy to make and linger over and then forget. But when they've mastered each other well enough, the traces left are subtler, and the intimacies taken are, too. He wakes babbling to find his forehead pulled to her chest, childlike; Rahi asks no more of his nightmares, though they trouble him still. Later, he watches with veiled eyes as he moves lazily inside her; though not a sound emerges, her mouth forms his name, and it fills her lips like narghile smoke. He and she steal covertly what lovers share with ease. In the imperfect idyll left to the two of them, they prove that they can be better. Their way can be gentle. But only in quietude, when the other is not looking.

...

"You smug, sweaty, little turd."

Jadeite scratches four days worth of growth, noncommittal. "You seem upset."

"You seem naked." The West-king looks more tired and tousled than normal, but still wrestles for a shadow of requisite obnoxiousness. "I'm glad your, ah, drought's ended since we spoke. Maybe we can talk business without you moping like a bitch."

He knows that'll be the last the other mentions it, and he's grateful. Unlike the druid king, who rarely lets prey in his web live overlong, Nephrite doesn't often intrude.

"Don't sulk, some sorry wench'll take pity on you and your blue balls eventually," he soothes. "But not anytime soon, my friend. You've the look of a hairy sack of shit."

"Sorry. We can't all lie abed with nothing better to do than eat Martian pussy." He pinches an unruly eyebrow and squints emotively out from under the other. "You probably guessed…but there's been news."

"Get on with it, then. I have pleasanter pastimes, as you've duly noted."

"We've heard Mercury's set aside their Speaker. And elected a new one. Hardly above their age of majority. It's being reported – widely – that she's a Senshi."

Jadeite struggles to keep his expression neutral. "So the Sorceress's hand finally shows."

"Why else would they vote a little girl into power?" Nephrite's broad mouth thins. "All of a sudden? Their old Speaker held the lyre for nearly sixty years."

His own voice sounds hollow to him. "Has she dropped the Ban yet?"

"Matter of time." The taller man kicks his feet up restively. He looks trapped in the screen, as he usually does, either too happy or too angry. "You don't let a guard dog – or bitch, I should say – piss on its territory, not unless it heels. And all the Senshi pant at her command. We'll see the Ban fall from Mercury soon, too, mark my words."

Hard not to mark the words of a man who makes small talk with the stars. "Our relationship with Mercury has always been cordial, if cool," he tries. "The Speaker may not follow the Moon in this matter, even if she's close to the Sorceress."

"And if she does? Stop talking at me like a coy statesman, and start thinking like the general I know." The booming baritone is startlingly solemn. "Can Earth really afford to wait, and we watch their alliance close in all around us? One great star at a time?"

"I don't know, Neph." It falls leaden from the Far Eastern king's mouth like rocks in a river, carried away so it feels they weren't his own to begin with. "Any planet with a Senshi for its sovereign will probably fall into line, sooner or later."

"I know, I know. It's not wise for you to speak of such matters while you're there. Martian walls must be practically made of ears." He rubs at his face agitatedly. "We could use a little of your subtlety, Jade, if it comes to negotiating with them. You know I haven't the patience and Zoisite's tongue is poison."

"He must be pissing his treehouse, or whatever it is druids piss in. Do you remember the the northern plagues?" and the West-king nods soberly. "We've always relied on Mercury to trade their medicines with us," Jadeite continues, his thoughts racing. He keeps them inside, keeps them from his face. Nephrite rarely gets credit for his own subtlety, but what he lacks in patience and prying, he makes up for with intuition. "Wait, where is Kunzite? Surely he'd be the best man to parley with the Speaker."

"One block of ice to another?" The spreading grin is irrepressible, irreverent contagion. "Maybe. But I haven't heard from our good commander in weeks. Business on the Delta, he said. Off honeymooning like you, you useless cocksucker."

His bland tone barely conceals his amusement. "He has a wife to honeymoon with."

"That'll be the day." A wicked light enters Nephrite's frank, open eyes. "Endy was with him, of course. Came back a few days ago. I bet even Princely dick aches after being devotedly jerked off for – "

"Look for me soon, Neph," he hastily detours, before the West-king warms to his subject matter. The other man laughs and shuts the device.

...

He'd enjoy a breeze on his fevered flesh, on his languorous sheets. But when the Far Eastern king turns his head to the window, the blue star beckons, faraway, a gem buried in soil – and he averts his gaze automatically. No matter; Jadeite isn't much inclined to move, anyway, not with smallest aftershocks yet trembling, not with her kiss, languid, where he tastes a little of himself. He breaks away, lungs heaving as she slides up, lithe against hard planes.

His last night on Mars, though he hasn't said as much. There is much unsaid and undone between them. They've spoken occasionally of things that hardly matter, and with some sense of relief, avoided the things that do. Things that have fangs. But some of its thirst spills into their lovemaking, and will not be contained, no matter how he tries. A suspension, the general thinks, not a surrender. A lull nearing its end.

"Something I've wondered a long time…" Rahi trails, as she trails the dragonwings tattooed over his shoulders. "…what made you think I was a Senshi from the first?"

He contemplates the vaulted ceiling, reverie fragmented by her fingertips.

"Guesswork," he answers her eventually. "No sheltered Oracle would care so much for Earthly doings. Victories, losses, maneuverings. But a Senshi might have use for such…intelligence."

"And what have you told your comrades?"

"About you? Nothing." The general shrugs. "We're…close."

"So I've heard," it emerges somewhere between playful and perturbed, and his chuckle sounds low in the dark.

"Not like that. At least…not me," he amends, after a moment's pause. "I just meant – they understand more than what's said."

"The less said, the better."

Her tone makes Jadeite stiffen.

"There's one in this world I bow before, Rahi." His palms curve full over her bottom, and give meaning to his words. "And none blessed with your shape, so don't try to give me orders."

"Then you should bed sheep and not queens," she answers imperturbably. "Go grovel to your Prince and tell him only this: I will be dealing with the exiles."

"As well as you've dealt with them for the past seven years – "

"I was a child of eleven when this started. What were _you _doing? Slaughtering men and salting fields? You could guard your own borders." Rahi elbows out of his hold, out of bed altogether.

His gaze follows her across the floor, nude form indistinct in the evening. Limbs lean as a panther, yet yielding under his touch, like a handful of jasmine. The remote divinity he met first, the Senshi leaning into wind on horseback, the girl whose own laughter always seems to surprise her. What has he understood of her, really? Even in this greatest intimacy, he sometimes feels he holds no more in his arms than mountain mist. Jadeite wonders if she strives to bewilder him, or if it's only Rahi's nature to restlessly shift, living goddess to girl and back again.

If he's seeking a vulnerability in her that exists only in his own desires.

Her voice is all the cold draft he needs on his stifled skin. "If I make mistakes as a ruler, they'll be my mistakes. I've allowed you in my walls and in my sheets, Jade. Let that be enough and steer your eyes from my throne. This red soil's too good for you."

"Something _I've_ wondered a long time," he drawls, ignoring her ire. "Why was I even permitted on your precious red soil? Why is there no Ban between Mars and Earth?"

"The Ban fell between the Moon and Earth too long ago for living memory, even for some of the Lunar court," comes the curt reply as she throws back a cup of water, or perhaps wine, from the hoarseness in her throat. "And until I say otherwise, it will not fall here."

"You've become quite adept at answering only the questions you want to answer."

"There's no need on Mars. After all, the Ban's only for your protection, nothing more." Belatedly, he notices how the braziers have lit that he can see. In the mirror, Rahi's long stare grabs and holds his. "There's more strange sorcery on the Moon than any of the planets put together, and it's not safe for those unaccustomed to it."

"The Sorceress can't have it both ways," he points out. "First you say magic is rising again on Earth, and in the same breath, we must be protected from magic on the Moon? What goes on in the Lunar court – that's so secret we savages can't know it?"

"You see."

She picks up a comb and tugs its carved teeth through snarls he's made, then puts it down, movements uncharacteristically disjointed. Rahi's expression is obscured by her shifting hair, but the hitch in her low voice is unmissable, for its rarity alone.

"We can never put these things behind us, Jade. They follow."

Jadeite swings his legs over the side of the bed and covers the space in a few steps. Her face tilts up into his hands, and he studies its high angles, its sharp slant of cheek and jaw. His fingers play with a bright wisp of hair. It's long fascinated him, how it seems to stir from nothing around her when she's angry or upset like this.

"Forgive me. Rumors from Mercury…they don't sit well on my home planet. Nor on my chest." She nods. Probably Rahi knew the news far before he did. He kisses one eyelid, then the other, mutely apologizing, and feels them ripple like koi swimming underwater. "I'm beginning to believe your ludicrous superstitions, Oracle."

"Don't." She takes his hand from her cheek into her own. "Leave resignation to me. It doesn't suit you."

Her ram's head seal presses into his fingers, solid, warm. "And...go with my goodwill."

"I felt it when I came as a small boy...that I wasn't finished here," he tells Rahi's smooth forehead. "I feel it now, too. You can call it my fate, but I call it my will."

"Maybe you are still that small boy," she offers softly.

"Maybe. Your Fire's never told me what I can and cannot have." Her eye is a glowing hieroglyph too close to read. Not once has it frightened him as it should, nor does it frighten him now. A self-preserving instinct long since left by the wayside, or so his brothers might say. "I want different things than I wanted then, and I want them more. You will see me again."

"I know," the Oracle replies, unhesitating. Unfathomable.

And then a smile to curve under his palm, a farewell surpassing in its sadness. "Even the Fire won't let me escape your face."

…

His return to Earth couldn't come a moment sooner.

As he surveys the dust-haloed sunrise, Jadeite can't help but notice the blotches on its surface – blotches that didn't catch his gaze before. But nightmares didn't dance beneath his eyelids before, either. Perhaps Rahi's misgivings rub off on him, perhaps not. For his own senses sigh and mutter with it now, uneasy. The general's not used to trepidation, but he's not sure what he's used to, anymore. Weeks spent on the star of war and warning itself might do worse to a different sort of man.

Poised on the beach between this world and his own, he sees a wave building, if only he could grasp at its foam. The Far Eastern king's departing a place that's yet foreign to him, but he knows the wind on Earth won't taste the same as he left it, either. He's not one to ignore his instincts, when they're all he has to temper his near insensate nerve. For he feels it even now, as though he's about to swim an ocean, not a stream.

As though he stands where the tide vanishes for miles, and brings the tsunami in.

…

…

…

…

…


	7. Master of Illusion Part Six

**Shaken in My Faith: Master of Illusion – Part Six**

…

…

…

…

…

_I'm finally home now  
__In my foreign land__  
_

-Alaska in Winter, _Berlin_

…

The mountain air drinks thin and clean; his lungs gulp deep until his head aches dizzily with it. Above, heaven hones its sharpest blue, and below, dirt gives way to rutted roads and cursing fishermen by the lake, baskets full of glistening, gutted prize. The night the Far Eastern king was crowned, they floated lanterns in lotuses across these waters. He vividly recalls their profuse fragrance, drifting in the drapes of his bed, richer even than the oils of his bedmates.

Markets dripping in garnets and gold, in myrrh and marigolds. Jadeite's face is covered as any crosser of the desert, but his blue eyes give him away, and soon the slyer merchants are chanting in his ear. His subjects know him well. Only in his kingdom six months of the year, he spends few of them shuttered in his fortress. Jadeite knows every back alley, every emptied sewer, every wall and every window. Wasn't he born in a brothel, only three or four turns away?

On, then to paved avenues where women peer from velveted palanquins, jet eyes narrowed, and then widened at the sight of their golden king. The noon sun beats too hot for him to stay masked. If he really wished to disguise himself…well, Jadeite's not above admitting he rather enjoys their lingering looks. As he observes, a twirl-mustached man – husband, likely – yanks a veil over his much younger wife's admiring expression. The general's smile widens.

This ancient city, this lodestone of the Far East. Claimed, he thinks, but never tamed.

It is home.

His reverie's carried him straight into his own cool courtyard. There are no great gates, no sentries; it only appears unwatched and unguarded. Water trickles sweet, and the few pages present gape at him openly without moving a muscle – they must be _very_ new – as Jadeite hikes up his clothes to wash the dust. Two women of middling age scuttle from the delicately chiseled archway, bare feet slapping on clear crystal.

"My lord king," one gasps. "If we'd known – we had no idea of your return – "

"Peace, Ramua," Jadeite catches her by the shoulders as she drops before him. "I had no idea of it, either. Don't worry yourself. I only just put down my belongings."

She still fusses, but the other's eyes crinkle in welcome. "Lord Zoisite'll be happy to see you retake the reins. He, ah, talks so often of the gentler northern climes – "

"Sounds about right," the general rolls his eyes, and Ramua proffers a towel for his dripping toes. "I'll keep the fine lady waiting no longer. Where is he, Cyrene?"

"In the blue tower." Cyrene's dry words bounce off the glass as he walks past her. "Speed your steps, my lord king. He's waited long, and shows not your patience."

…

Jadeite's scarcely stepped into the room before the pungent smell of brine hits his nostrils, and he ducks as the wave makes for his head. Expecting to feel it splash behind him, he twists only to see an orb of seawater suspended innocuously there.

"My lord!" Thetis squeals, and launches herself at him in a blur of overlong teenaged limbs.

His arms swing her up with accustomed ease, but he notes awkwardly how she burrows right into his neck, clings to his shoulders too tight. "Your aim's improved too much for my liking, princess."

"And not enough for mine," from behind her. Above Thetis's head, he uncomfortably meets Zoisite's glittering gaze; a faint flicker there, and the ocean orb evaporates in flame.

Jadeite sets the girl down quickly. "Look at you," he laughs as he strides forward. "Tanned as a native, and bejeweled as a eunuch. The Far East agrees with you."

"Bores me, more like. Is it a castle you keep or a cathouse? _All_ of your servants women, down to a one?" he drawls. "Really, I thought the Far East a land of diversity."

He's hyperaware of the adoring eyes at his back. "I haven't your taste for…variety, Zoi."

The younger man finally relents, closes the distance and clasps him by the arms. There are newer freckles, and his coppery hair's lightened almost as Jadeite's, but the edged smile is the same. "And you. What, haven't you seen daylight this month?"

"No. The sun on Mars is cold."

"But the nights are hot, no doubt," Zoisite replies under his breath, before straightening. "Thetis, your lord and I have much to discuss – "

"All of it boring," Jadeite tells her lightly where she waits, hands clasping and unclasping. "I've a present for you, princess. Ask Cyrene where my things are."

Thetis looks about to argue, but the mention of a gift sways her. "Have it your way," as she turns the handle. "But I want to hear all about Mars. Don't start without me!"

Jadeite waits until she's out of earshot before he moves toward the door, as well. "Before…the girl would've just gone. Your whining's obviously a poor influence."

"If she's becoming wilful, just look to her parents," the younger general sniffs, falling into step. "But she's becoming stronger, too. I'm impressed with her progress. As for her face and form…you can have no complaints on that score, certainly."

"I don't rate either," he responds flatly as they exit in the opposite direction. "And you'd do well to stop raising her hopes, calling me her lord. Nothing's decided."

"Your client kings are fat frauds, even if they coo all over their precious peacock emperor now. An heir would give you a little security, Jade." Zoisite cuts off his rising protest. "And you, more than any of us, need some semblance of legitimacy. Surely," he adds softly, " – surely, this is the dynasty your father wanted for you."

"How appealing you make it all sound – being Kunzite's son-in-law."

The druid king snickers. "Now, there, I wouldn't envy you."

The other man knows he's lost this one; Jadeite hears it in his tone. "So," he broaches the subject casually as they descend a soaring staircase. "What news from Mercury? Has the Prince congratulated the Speaker on her victory yet? It's been a few days – "

"Endymion has been in Elysion the past week, and Nephrite has gone there, as well."

Unreachable, then, both of them. "Seems a bit lax on protocol – " he cuts himself off. "Don't tell me _you_ spoke with her." At the other's cursory nod, Jadeite halts.

"What was it you said to me the other day? 'Your faith in my judgment is inspiring'?" Zoisite mocks, not stopping in his stride, and after a few seconds, the Far Eastern king catches up. "Really, our conversation was so short, I hardly had time to offend."

"Wouldn't blame you if you did. You've more cause to bear a grudge than any."

The other nods again, tightly. "Perhaps…it's best I spoke with her, and none else. You remember the first delegation from Mercury I met?"

"After..." Jadeite swallows. "I remember."

What's not spoken of is not forgotten. The envy he once felt, looking upon the most gifted mage he'd yet come across. Fire, flowers, ice; no spell seemed barred to the youngest of the Shitennou.

That was before the plagues ripped through the misted islands. He remembers how thousands of the ill had burned in Zoisite's waning flames to keep miasma from spreading. Dead and living alike, before the old Speaker finally deigned to meet with the failing lord of the north. To haggle over medicines that flowed on Mercury as water.

Jadeite could not say he envied what was left of the druid king after that, a mere shell of the man he'd met first.

Zoisite continues, after a beat. "She...she must remember too, for she was one of their party. A child then, maybe eleven or so. I remember thinking her presence peculiar…but then, I was half-dead and in no state to ask questions. But…now, I wonder if she came as a newly awakened Senshi. As a scout for her Sorceress, to laugh at our misfortunes." He grimaces. "And today…she's their elected Speaker."

"It would make sense for the Sorceress to start with Mercury. Cut off the only real communication we have, outside Earth. So what did you and the Speaker discuss?"

"Nothing of interest. Butter wouldn't melt in this one's mouth." They've reached the fortress's innermost depths; unlike elsewhere, no rays of light penetrate here. His tone grows thoughtful. "In fact, that's what makes me so sure the gossips are right. I think the Sorceress rigged the vote for her pet, because to be frank, I can't think why _else_ she'd win it. Not much to look at. The girl hardly seems a warrior out of legend."

The Far Eastern king chuckles as the massive trapdoor swings open at Zoisite's slightest touch. "Well. If we're to be frank here…neither do you."

The blaze in the younger man's palm throws light on his smile, and the tang of blood fills Jadeite's nose at the same time he sees it rusting over dank walls. "Very true."

…

"I thought I told you to go easy," the general comments, gazing down at the twelve or so burly men littering the soiled floor, not even chained and still cowering. He can't miss how they shrink backward with every step the druid king takes forward.

"I did."

Zoisite reclines against the pillar, thumbs already twiddling. "Once I realized there were too many Martians in your kingdom to put in one place – we'll talk about that, by the way – I took the liberty of choosing a select few for the comforts of your palace. These are the younger ones. I figured they'd crack." He shrugs. "They didn't."

"But you said they told you of the Oracle's beauty – "

"Only in their prayers to her. In delirium. I put two and two together myself after talking with Nephrite. Of course. You _would_ find a vow of chastity irresistible – "

"Silence," Jadeite orders. "Not here."

He scans the dismal chamber, finding the youngest glowering up at him. Seventeen, he'd say, maybe less. Eyes scarcely visible under a matted fringe of hair, but they snap with hate, just like Phobos's and Deimos's had. "You. What's your name, boy?"

The youth spits, and then spits blood when the back of Jadeite's hand finds his jaw.

"Answer your king," Zoisite advises quietly where he stands. "Or I will make you."

"He's not my king," he snarls back, and the younger general jerks from the pillar.

"That won't be necessary." Jadeite crouches. "I've no wish to be your king, but it seems your queen has abandoned you to my care. I know something of Martian punishment, and believe me, we've made an exquisite art of it here in the Far East."

He holds his mutinous silence, and the Far Eastern king continues, nonplussed.

"You have spirit, like all your brethren. Something I've always admired in your people. Here you are, banished from a planet that hates you to a planet you hate. How ironic, to be sent from the star of rebellion – because you were rebellious."

The prisoner's expression is all the confirmation he needs. "How – do you know – ?"

"Show me your back, boy."

Too stupefied to fight, he lets the general shove his filthy head down and yank his shirt up. Behind, Zoisite lets out a gasp. "The dragon of the Far East – how – "

In his usual impatience, he seizes a handful of tunic and Jadeite feels the blade of ice almost cold enough to burn, baring his shoulders to their view. He expects the sound before it starts, buzzing, sibilant; the prisoners' murmurs grow and multiply.

The wings tattooed there are identical to the youth's – to all of theirs.

"It's exactly as she said," he marvels to himself, rising slowly to his feet, letting his own shirt fall. "Exiles, Zoi, not spies. This is the mark of the Council's banishment."

"But – how the hell did _you_ come to wear it?"

"My father waited all his life to speak with that cunt. He didn't go from Mars quietly." The stink of flesh under iron – the lucid certainty of children, certainty that he'd be the one screaming and thrashing next – Jadeite curses his own memory's clarity. "Before this dragon stamped all our standards…it branded his back. And mine."

Comprehension dawns in the other's eyes; only the barest of explanations are required between these two. "Your father made it your symbol."

"He told me to wear it with pride. Now you know why I was shocked the old Oracle granted _me_ an audience – and even more shocked to find a new Oracle in her place."

The Far Eastern king turns away from a face gone chalky under its newly acquired tan. The youth stares at him, unreadable. "I'll ask once more. What's your name?"

He licks split lips. "Kumada."

"Kumada," he repeats, tasting the familiar-unfamiliar dialect.. "Listen well. Today – you and every Martian held in my borders are free to go where you will. I know what you all are. Convicts, ex-soldiers – aliens, but I really couldn't care less what your Martian crimes were. Because tomorrow, if you commit them in _my_ kingdom…" he claps his palm over the still reddened sear, and Kumada hisses. "I know how to find you. Consider this your first and last warning."

"Are you mad?" Zoisite bursts hotly, and Jadeite can tell without looking; rarely static, the younger man is practically twitching now. "You can't possibly loose all these convicts upon your lands, Jade, if that's what the Oracle said they are. You don't understand, there are _thousands_ of them – "

"I know all that and more," he interrupts. "I know what they think of us, high up in their dusty dome, and now here, too. That we're brutes without rhyme or reason. We will show them otherwise. That they're the brutes, who kiss children with fire."

Jadeite takes the prisoner by the arms and forcibly lifts him, clear blue melding with black. "We will show them how Earth welcomes their outcasts – without being weak."

…

In the cold north, he's heard of men who consume the sins of others, that they might go to paradise unburdened. Sometimes he wonders if the Golden Kingdom's most feared gaoler ever thinks – who would complete that ritual for him? Eat a crust of bread and drink a cup of wine over his corpse? Who does Zoisite whisper to, of his body of transgressions? Perhaps Jadeite will never know, but his own tale needs such an unflinching ear. Someone impartial. Someone who will not – cannot – judge.

"Didn't anything happen when…" Zoisite pauses with unusual delicacy, searching the board before them for the words. "I mean, when her vow was…ah, broken?"

The general raises a blond eyebrow. "Were you expecting fireworks?"

"I can't help a little curiosity, jealousy even, suffering tales of your prowess while cooped up in your castle," the other smirks. "But really, the Fire didn't…didn't…?"

Jadeite takes a deep swallow of wine, and shifts a yellow gamepiece. "You _would_ revere such magic, you statue worshipers. Personally, I've always thought this "wed to the Fire" bullshit just that – bullshit. Politics. The Council doesn't want the Oracle to spawn – she'd wish for her own children to rule the red star. Her own influence."

"She has influence enough. Senshi ruling both Mars and Mercury…" the younger man trails off. "We can't ignore the implications, if it's the truth. Sure, she says she knew nothing of these exiles, but maybe she's lying, maybe these are the Moon's orders – "

"Dozens of times the Oracle saw the dragon on my back. If she were behind this, she'd give herself away in recognizing the mark of her dungeon. It's not her nature to dissemble." The general rolls the cowries, and his lips compress. "She's not as powerful as she could be. As her predecessor. Said she'll remedy the situation, but…the Council flouts her authority whenever she's not on Mars, and…"

"You say she's not powerful? From where I stand…" Zoisite pushes his green into a castle square. "Mars has mustered armies against you, dumped malcontents in your lands, and generally shat all over the Far East since you were a boy. And now you're defending her, when you have grounds for war. From where I stand, Jade…" he lets out a low whistle, and drops the red gamepiece home. "She's made you her bitch."

"Say what you will," he answers, folding his arms behind his head, studied. "So long as you respect my decision in this matter, I don't give two shits for your scorn."

Long fingers drum irritatingly, silver clinking with glass. "I respect that you've seen enough bloodshed in your life. That you don't wish to spill more. But…I fear you'll regret staying your hand in this affair. Kunzite will expect – "

"He will not know," the Far Eastern king cuts him off firmly. "This stays between us."

Zoisite stills completely, hand suspended over the board. "Now I _know_ you're mad."

"What business is it of his?" Jadeite asks with deceptive calm. "This concerns only my kingdom, my palace, and my bed."

"If all you were doing was letting Mars humiliate the Far East, I might agree," the druid king retorts. "But your sweetheart is a Senshi, so this is between Earth and the Moon as well. Your dealings with the Oracle must come to light, sooner or later – "

"And so they will, in time," he pacifies. "Come, now, you don't report every rock that falls in your realm to our commander, do you? Let me manage this my way first – "

"Damn you, and damn your secrets," Zoisite cuts in softly. "I worry less for what you've brought back – more for what you've left behind." He leans forward. "What hold has she on you, Jade? You really think he won't see what writhes there, like always? There won't be enough left of you to feed flies if Kunzite finds out – "

"Finds out what?"

Thetis stops short in the doorway, a touch breathless. Jadeite immediately notices his casually purchased gift looping her neck, garnets crowding her small chest. His throat closes.

He should've picked anything else, lapis or even jade, for he can't help but picture these stones on another, breaking from her skin like morning sun from white mist.

"Beautiful," the other man echoes his thoughts into the lingering quiet, and with a jolt, he sees the dark head again, the rounded, childish face. "Already you look the part. The empress of the Far East." Zoisite turns, face oddly impassive. "Don't you think?"

The girl smiles self-consciously, fingering the heavy jewels. "Were you talking of the Ban, just now? Oh – " her brow furrows. "So you think it will fall from Mars, too?"

"No," the general finds his voice, and its hoarseness takes him aback. "No, it will not."

The druid king beckons her close, and she perches gingerly on the table, scanning the board carefully. "But what would happen if it did? From all the other planets?"

Jadeite watches her move his gamepieces, yellow, then black, but his gaze rests upon a faraway board. "If the Ban closed around us…they could be doing anything behind its shield, and we'd never know it."

"The Ban's more for us than for them, anyway. To keep Earth from growing too strong," Thetis continues, rattling off the cowries; probably rattling off her tutor's lessons, as well. "But if we're so strong, who cares? Couldn't we just take them all over, anyway?"

A short, surprised laugh escapes Zoisite. "Aren't we bloodthirsty. I don't think we have to plot that far just yet. Other stars are unaccounted for. Jupiter…no one has ruled that madhouse for years, and..." he tosses his own hand, and curses. "…and I seriously doubt the crown princess of Venus is a Senshi. The lot of them mate their own brothers and sisters so often, she's probably got all the wits of a box of hair."

"But what lovely hair it must be," the general teases. "And you're jumping to conclusions, Zoi. They breed with each other to keep their bloodlines strong, their magic pure. And only the strongest takes the crown. Might be more spells in her pretty pinky finger than all the druids combined."

A shudder goes through the younger man. "I'll never understand such unnatural lust." His eyes fly up, distaste locking with disquiet. "Speaking of," he mutters indistinctly for Jadeite's ears alone as he rises from his seat. "Your mother will be missing you, little one. I think it's time we went back."

She turns aquamarine eyes on the general. "Aren't you coming, too?"

"I've too much business here in the capital, princess," he deflects. "You know I've been gone almost a month."

"At least let the Prince see your face, hm?" The younger general's thin lips hook. "Who knows, if you're especially lucky, Kunzite might have already returned, too."

"I should've nailed you up on a wall when you were too puny to fight back."

"Where I come from, that would sound very much like an invitation." He watches amusedly as Jadeite drains both their cups. "But…it's good to have you back, brother."

He wipes his wet mouth with his knuckles. "Good to be back."

And it is, the general thinks readily. Of course it is. He only needs to look out to the great capital winking torch by torch into twilit existence, purpling foothills beyond, and even further, untold sands hunting the horizon. All his. Could he have dreamed it?

The wicks sputter by the window, and the sun reddens in their smoke. As his eyes sting from the ash, only for a moment…all at once, the Far Eastern king can almost see bleeding sky above him, naked rock below him, and eyes burning inside him.

He's there again, stepping onto that still land, where fire endures without wind.

But only for a moment.

…

The Moon's long pearled the winding towers of the High Palace when they arrive. Thetis hadn't woken even when they teleported; Jadeite shifts her weight a little over his shoulder, and feels her soft breath steady in his ear. Beside him, the druid king motions a few sleepy servants to hush, but it turns out to be unnecessary. A tall figure looms at the gate, bearing a bright lantern that illuminates all but its bearer.

The general starts immediately up the marble steps, avoiding the thorned brambles and roses on both sides. Zoisite tarries just a little longer. Any overuse of his power drains him, but they all tacitly ignore his fits of fatigue. At the top stair, Jadeite flings up a hand, blinking rapidly in sudden light, before strong arms pull Thetis from him. The younger general's beside him now, and they incline their heads respectfully.

"Is this the state you bring my only child in?"

He manages a smile, despite his own exhaustion. "The journey must've tired her."

"And us," Zoisite's already walking past. "So I beg you, spare us the interrogation until morning."

Beryl laughs and tucks her daughter's sleeping head under her chin, that their hair spills together like pooled ink. "The night is cold, and the Moon is waning. Come."

…

…

…

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End file.
